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Sociology • Media Studies
Arguing earnestly and incisively that these metaphors, if left unexamined, bind us
into a cycle of violence that will only be intensified by a responsive violence of
metaphor, Erin Steuter and Deborah Wills examine compelling examples of the
images of animal, insect, and disease that inform, shape, and limit our understanding of the war on terror. Tying these images to historical and contemporary uses
of propaganda through a readable, accessible analysis of media filters, At War
with Metaphor vividly explores how news media, including political cartoons and
talk radio, are enmeshed in these damaging, dehumanizing metaphors. Analyzing
media through the lenses of race and Orientalism, the book invites us to hold our
media and ourselves accountable for the choices we make in talking war and
making enemies.
ERIN STEUTER is associate professor of sociology at Mount Allison University.
DEBORAH WILLS is associate professor of English at Mount Allison University.
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AtWarwithMetaphorLITHO.indd 1
AT WAR WITH METAPHOR
When photographs documenting the torture and humiliation of prisoners at Abu
Ghraib came to the attention of a horrified public, national and international voices
were raised in shock, asking how this happened. At War with Metaphor offers an
answer, arguing that the abuses of Abu Ghraib were part of a systemic continuum
of dehumanization. This continuum has its roots in our public discussions of the war
on terror and the metaphors through which they are repeatedly framed.
STEUTER
WILLS
AND
“A valuable contribution to our growing understanding of the ways in which we
talk ourselves into war, genocide, and other crimes against humanity. It causes us
to wonder what might happen if we had the courage to deal with our rivalries and
conflicts in a realistic manner rather than dehumanizing and demonizing those we
consider enemies.”
—SAM KEEN, author of Faces of the Enemy
AT WAR WITH
METAPHOR
MEDIA, PROPAGANDA, AND RACISM IN
THE WAR ON TERROR
ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2198-6
ISBN-10: 0-7391-2198-7
90000
9 780739 121986
Cover illustration by Aidan Hughes,
www.brutepop.com
ERIN STEUTER AND DEBORAH WILLS
6/17/08 12:52:06 PM
At War with Metaphor
At War with Metaphor
Media, Propaganda, and Racism in the War on Terror
Erin Steuter and Deborah Wills
LEXINGTON BOOKS
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ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC.
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Steuter, Erin, 1963–
At war with metaphor: media, propaganda, and racism in the war on terror / Erin
Steuter and Deborah Wills.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2198-6 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-7391-2198-7 (cloth: alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3031-5 (electronic)
ISBN-10: 0-7391-3031-5 (electronic)
1. Mass media—Social aspects. 2. Mass media and public opinion. 3. Terrorism in
mass media. 4. Fear. 5. Propaganda. 6. Social control. I. Wills, Deborah, 1962– II.
Title.
HM1206.S74143 2008
070.4'49909831—dc22
2008016776
Printed in the United States of America
⬁™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of
American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper
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Contents
Acknowledgments
vii
Introduction
ix
Part I: Metaphor Matters
Chapter 1
Weaponizing Words: Metaphor and War
Chapter 2
Making Enemies: Propaganda and the Making of
the Orientalist “Other”
17
Rallying Racism: Dehumanization and Genocide
37
Chapter 3
1
Part II: Enlisting Discourse
Chapter 4
Rats in the Trap: Animal Metaphors in the News
69
Chapter 5
Infestation and Eradication: Exterminationist
Rhetoric in Political Cartoons
99
HateSpeak: Discourses of Dehumanization in
Talk Radio
131
Chapter 6
Part III: Dangerous Discourses
Chapter 7
Media March to War: Understanding News Filters
v
155
vi
Contents
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Boiling the Blood and Narrowing the Mind:
Fomenting Backlash
189
Talking our Way to Peace: New Metaphors
for Change
201
Bibliography
213
Index
237
About the Authors
245
Acknowledgments
In this book we argue that the mainstream media can act as a stenographer
to power, “spin” even horrific acts of brutality, and characterize opposition as
disloyalty. Thus to research and write a book that challenges the official story
and provides documentation of events and issues not normally explored by
the media involves accessing the work of a phenomenal network of investigative independent journalists and social justice activists. This book could
not have been written without all the intellectuals, reporters, and citizen
journalists who dedicated themselves to doing the hard work of investigative
reporting and sharing their findings even when it was not always popular to
do so. While the mainstream news media bears the blame for boiling the
blood and narrowing the mind of so many readers, the alternative news media deserves considerable credit for speaking the truth to power. Progressive
magazines and radical newsletters such as Z, The Nation, CounterPunch, The
New Statesman, Dissident Voice, In these Times, and Left Turn Magazine have
led the way in providing a forum for the insights of progressive intellectuals
and journalists. Alternative news centers such as AlterNet, Common Dreams,
and Democracy Now generate news and provide a venue for alternative
voices and independent media sources that often fall below the public’s radar.
Tremendous care and careful documentation is evident in web sites such as
tolerance.org, antiwar.com, www.why-war.com as well as watchdog organizations such as Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, Genocide Watch,
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, PR Watch, Source Watch, and Media Matters for America. These organizations maintain their independence from the
vii
viii
Acknowledgments
pressure of corporate advertisers by sacrificing lucrative advertising revenues.
We all benefit from their unbeholden voices. The writers and publishers of
these magazines and websites have our wholehearted gratitude for bringing
us the news we need to make sense of the world we live in and they deserve
the support of subscribers that the mainstream media has forfeited.
Reading the insights of leading intellectuals is a valuable way to engage
with the news but actually interacting with them in a forum to share knowledge and insights in pursuit of social justice is a profoundly democratic and
empowering experience. ES is grateful for the opportunities and encouragement she gained by engaging with progressive social leaders through the opportunities created by the Z Media Institute and the Boston College Media Research and Action Project. The encouragement and direction of the leaders
and alumna of the Woodhull Institute provided the essential road map to publishing this book.
Research support from Mount Allison University, the encouragement of
colleagues, librarians, and academic administrators, and the energy and dedication of our undergraduate research assistants David Morse and Melissa
Calvin, are sincerely recognized and appreciated. Freelance journalist Carole
Pearson helped us communicate our vision of this book to our publisher.
Artist Aidan Hughes created a powerful book cover image that has garnered
the appreciative admiration of our undergraduate students.
Our friends and loved ones know who they are and we hope we make clear
our profound appreciation for them in regular and meaningful ways.
Introduction
Let’s begin with two pictures. One, a political cartoon, shows a grim-faced
Uncle Sam as Dad behind the wheel of the family car. The license plate reads
“USA.” The windshield is splattered with dead bugs; look a bit more closely
and the bugs are revealed as tiny turbaned men, wearing traditional Muslim
garb and carrying machine guns. Some are squashed, plastered like mosquitos across the grille; others are still alive and running, trying to avoid being
crushed by the advancing wheels. Inside the car, the children clamor in an
insistent chorus, “Are we there yet?”1 (See figure i.1) It’s hard not to wonder
where this road trip will end.
The second image shows a naked Arab prisoner at the end of a leash
gripped by an American soldier. The soldier gazes not at the photographer
but down at the prostrate body of her captive: there is a chilling impassivity
in her expression as she looks down the length of the leash. This picture is
familiar by now, part of the infamous series of photographs showing American soldiers torturing and humiliating enemy soldiers and civilians in Iraq’s
Abu Ghraib prison. The message of this image seems more immediate, more
horrifying, and more easily understood than that of the political cartoon.
Why, then, juxtapose these two pictures? In many ways, they are crucially
different: one is fictional, the other fact, part of a documentary record of torment and abuse. One is intended, in the tradition of political cartoons, to
elicit amusement and encourage political analysis; the other is a photograph,
an apparently more neutral chronicling of events. One is an individual artistic expression; the other portrays a collective action, captured by a viewer
ix
x
Introduction
Figure i.1.
Darryl Cagle. “Taliban Bugs Windshield.” MSNBC.com. October 30, 2001.
whose mind was clearly far from questions of art. Yet these two images also
share crucial similarities, and are, in fact, profoundly connected. In contrast
to the notorious Abu Ghraib photograph, which has given rise to international shock and outrage, calls for war crimes trials and societal transformation, the political cartoon has largely been seen as harmless satire. Yet the
images and metaphors used by the media to frame and shape our public discussion of the war on terror inform both photo and cartoon in profound ways,
and in both artifacts require careful scrutiny. There is a crucial correlation
between mainstream news media’s readiness to repeatedly characterize opponents as insects or animals and what happened at Abu Ghraib, in which the
metaphor of the animal is made horrifyingly literal. The slide from satirical
insects to leashed humans, from cartoon to photograph, is all too easy. The
human rights violations that emerged from Abu Ghraib are intricately connected to our war narratives, past and present, to our metaphoric systems,
and to the kinds of stories we tell ourselves.
The images and language we use to discuss the war on terror have a powerful impact on the way we think about and treat other human beings. The
Introduction xi
metaphors we draw upon, often profoundly racist, increasingly threaten our
chances of building a safe society. The language used by mainstream news
media, politicians, military commanders, think tank scholars, religious leaders, pundits, columnists and bloggers in response to terrorism ironically
makes us less safe by creating a world of discourse characterized by fundamental and insoluble divisions. We see this in both informal and official public speech: New York Republican Congressman Peter King refers to American Muslims as the “enemy living amongst us”; Illinois Congressman Mark
Kirk comments: “I’m okay with discrimination against young Arab males
from terrorist-producing states.” Texas Congressman Sam Johnson brags to a
crowd of veterans that he advised Bush to nuke Syria, and Colorado Congressman and candidate for the Republican nomination for President Tom
Tancredo advocates wiping out Mecca in response to terrorist attacks. Former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger states on CNN immediately after 9/11 that “There is only one way to begin to deal with people like this,
and that is you have to kill some of them even if they are not immediately
directly involved in this thing.”2 Daniel Pipes, a representative at the U.S.
government-sponsored think tank U.S. Institute for Peace, exemplifies the
discourses of dehumanization that allow and promote such talk of indiscriminate eradication. He figuratively links Muslims to disease, carriers of a religiously specific pathology. To Pipes, all Muslims are prey to a latent psychopathic contagion:
Individuals may appear law-abiding and reasonable, but they are part of a totalitarian movement, and as such, all must be considered potential killers. . . .
This is what I have dubbed the Sudden Jihad Syndrome, whereby normalappearing Muslims abruptly become violent. It has the awful but legitimate
consequence of casting suspicion on all Muslims. Who knows whence the next
jihad? How can one be confident a law-abiding Muslim will not suddenly erupt
in a homicidal rage?3
Pipes’ pathological metaphor underlies, supports, and advances political calls
to eradicate the enemy, a strategy justified as a cure for the “syndrome” of difference.
Many European leaders employ equally problematic language in statements
about Islamic communities within their countries. Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi states that the superiority of western civilization entitled
it to “occidentalize and conquer new people.” Italian MP Roberto Calderoli
flaunts his Muhammad cartoon T-shirt on TV, warning of an “Islamic attack
on the West.” Former French Interior Minister and now President of France,
Nicolas Sarkozy, publicly labels Muslim immigrants “gangrene” and “scum,”
xii
Introduction
and Danish MP Pia Kjærsgaards calls Muslims “a cancer in Denmark.”4 Such
recurring metaphors of disease, decay, and dehumanization are a frequent part
of European and North American public discourse. While it is common to
mock or dismiss the controversial statements of “shock talk” radio hosts, it is
worth noting that the audience for these programs numbers in the millions;
many of their hosts also reach thousands of readers through their best-selling
books. American syndicated radio host Neil Boortz tells his audience of over
3.75 million listeners5 that
Islam is a creeping mold infestation. Islam is a virus. It is a deadly virus that is
spreading throughout Europe and the West. We’re going to wait far too long to
develop a vaccine to find a way to fight this.6
Dehumanizing metaphor also flourishes in print: Steve Dunleavy, a
columnist with the New York Post, the fastest growing newspaper in the U.S.
with a readership of almost 800,000,7 writes that “The response to this
unimaginable twenty-first-century Pearl Harbor should be as simple as it is
swift—kill the bastards. A gunshot between the eyes, blow them to
smithereens, poison them if you have to. As for cities or countries that host
these worms, bomb them into basketball courts.”8 The respected mainstream
news source The Washington Post offers an editorial entitled “Terrorism as
Virus.”9 Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Maureen Dowd writes in the New
York Times, the paper of record, that Al Qaeda is “replicating and coming at
us like cockroaches.” In the UK, the Sun tabloid runs the headline “Caught
Like Rats in a Trap” alongside a photo of two bare-chested Arab suspects
with their hands in the air.10 In Canada, mainstream newspaper the Calgary
Sun prints a headline reading “Britain Bitten By A Snake; Country Failed to
Crack Down on Those Who Incited Hatred and Murder.”11 Internationally,
the internet community is rife with such invective, such as this posting following the 2004 Madrid train bombings:
It doesn’t matter which batch of terrorists actually did it. If rats infest my house
and one bites the baby in her crib, I’m not gonna fart around taking dental impressions to make sure I’m killing the right rat. I’m going to exterminate every
rat from the helpless old granny rats to the little innocent baby rats until there
are no more rats in my house.12
In the war on terror, mainstream news media headlines trumpet “Rat
Trapped” at the arrest of an enemy leader, bloggers label ethnic minorities at
home and abroad “cockroaches,” and political pundits call for the extermination of entire countries. Military officials report on “cleansing” operations,
Introduction xiii
and Islam is called a “cancer.” Muslims are said to “infest” our communities,
and Iraqis are called dune coons, sand niggers and camel jockeys. Turbanwearing men are called “diaper heads” by elected politicians.13 There are regular calls for the arrest and deportation of non-white immigrants from European and North American countries. Most disturbing of all is the repeated
call for the extermination and annihilation of entire countries that may or
may not harbor suspected terrorists but which are certainly home to millions
of peaceful families.
This is a war in which the deaths directly and indirectly attributable to the
U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq have neared one million people, a body
count higher than the genocides in Rwanda and Sudan,14 in which soldiers
are implicated in the rape and murder of children at Al-Mahmudiyah, and in
which civilians are massacred at Haditha. These very real phenomena are
supported by sometimes subtle but equally real linguistic patterns. The dehumanizing metaphors employed in our public discussion of the war on terror have a powerful impact on the way we think and act; by systematically
stripping humans of humanity, they provide a cultural platform for acts of war
and a potent cognitive framework for interpreting such acts.
As the official reasons justifying the war in Iraq continue to erode under
public scrutiny and investigation, many people have begun to ask “how did
we get here?” This book explores the work of public discourse about the war
in order to help to answer this question. Part I: Metaphor Matters, establishes
the primacy of metaphor in speech, thought and cognition, arguing that the
metaphors imported into the public discourse surrounding the war on terror
have crucial consequences in that they frame the war’s objects, enemies, and
essential terms in ways that shape both perceptions and consequences. Chapter one makes a case for metaphor’s individual and social influence and explores the implications and consequences of the framing of North America’s
encounter with terrorism through an apparently unavoidable martial
metaphor. Chapter two examines propaganda’s seizure of this metaphoric potency in its construction of an enemy Other, with particular attention to the
role of race and Orientalism in this fabrication. The role of propaganda in
creating an image of our enemies is examined, with particular emphasis on
the racism of orientalist discourse in fabricating an alien Other. Chapter
three discusses the dynamics of dehumanization and its contribution to civilian casualties and genocide, illustrated through historical examples of racist
propaganda such as Nazi depictions of Jews, representations of the Japanese
during WWII, and more recent examples from the first Persian Gulf War and
Rwanda. Part II: Enlisting Discourse, extends the first section’s premises to
an analysis of how the historically resilient metaphors discussed in the first
xiv
Introduction
section circulate through current media in ways both familiar and unexpected. Original case studies in this section focus on animal metaphors in
print media, extermination metaphors in political cartoons, and metaphors
of evolutionary debasement in talk radio in chapters four, five, and six respectively. These chapters interrogate a range of media practice that encompasses the written, the visual, and the oral, discovering a remarkable consistency of metaphor across the breadth of that spectrum. A similarly striking
metaphoric consistency is evident across another media spectrum, in that
case-study sources drawn from media outlets in varying degrees of legitimacy
and popularity all seem to evince almost identical metaphoric tropes within
the war discourse. From the “funny pages” to front page headlines, from
mainstream paper-of-record to supermarket tabloid, from radio phone-ins to
tirade-riddled shock-jock talk-show hosts, the same metaphors surface, circulate and resonate. Each case-study chapter in this section also investigates
some of the consequences of these metaphors, drawing a direct link between
dehumanizing tropes and figures and dehumanizing acts and practices: phenomena such as trophy-taking and “war porn,” this section argues, find their
source in the pervasiveness and consistency of the damaging metaphors in
which even mainstream media continually re-invests itself.
The book’s final section, Part III: Dangerous Discourses, addresses the
contexts and constraints of media production that help account for the perpetuation of these metaphors, metaphors which intensify and promote hate
speech and hate crimes in the U.S. and abroad. A critical and analytical
awareness of such contexts and the tropes they engender offers one way to
counter media hegemony. Only when we achieve a distance from these
metaphors that is tangible as well as critical, this final section argues, will we
be able to formulate more emancipatory metaphors. Chapter seven analyzes
the media filters that often disguise the workings of metaphor in discourse,
while allowing dominant agendas to appear neutral and uncontested. Chapter eight asserts that the consequences of failing to unpack the metaphors of
hate speech are not solely discursive, but have measurable consequences,
generating backlash, renewing violence and undermining both safety and the
possibility of resolution. Chapter nine suggests that the way we frame the war
on terror shapes and prohibitively limits the solutions we can develop in response. It observes that although our cultural lexicon of dehumanizing
metaphor has been remarkably enduring, it can also be made subject to a revisionary re-framing. By coaxing metaphor from the realm of the tacit into
the realm of the visible, as we do in this book, we may take a first necessary
step towards that revision.
Introduction xv
As the work of scholars studying propaganda makes clear, the weapons of
war are never solely physical.15 Language itself, in the way it invites us to understand both the enemy and ourselves, becomes a potential weapon. But
propaganda is found in more than the blatantly jingoistic WWII posters and
martial sloganeering that the word conjures up. Because language embeds our
values and assumptions, even in apparently calmer, more neutral discussion,
language is always hard at work. In the war on terror, as in past wars, language
serves the purposes of propaganda. It is language, rather than logic, that summons us through its emotional affect to a war we can no longer justify.
The way that we frame the war, in language, in public debate, and in
metaphor, matters. Through selecting and reporting only certain facts,
through overlooking or distorting others of equal relevance, through the associations we conjure to describe our opponents, we neglect or invalidate
genuine discussion and debate, and promote instead public hysteria, panic,
and witch hunts. We rally the public to a cause that is misrepresented or confused against an enemy who is never understood. Edward S. Herman notes
that in the seventeenth century Daniel Dafoe reported that “there were a
hundred thousand stout country fellows . . . ready to fight to the death
against Popery, without knowing whether Popery was a man or a horse”; in
our day, likewise, there are millions of stout-hearted fellows ready to fight to
the death against terrorism without knowing anything of its real nature.16
The language of war, which includes the metaphors it draws on, does not
simply hold a mirror up to the enemy. It does not reveal a clear, objective, or
pre-existing image of what we fight. What is reflected in language is not reality but construct, something conditioned and assembled, put together from
fragments of information and observation. Parts of these observations may
very well be accurate, but they are always influenced and shaped by the
processes and contexts of their assembly. In this sense, we really do, through
the metaphors we choose and reiterate, “make” enemies. The mirror of language thus ultimately reflects back to us both the constructed image of the
other and, also, something of ourselves.
And this, when it comes down to it, is why metaphors matter. When they
are called upon to justify acts of violence that we would not normally endorse
or tolerate, it becomes imperative to examine these metaphors with care, to
unpack their freight of assumptions about race and culture, virtue and violence. We need to know not only whether the enemy is “a man or a horse,”
but more importantly, how representing that enemy as bestial shapes both
our understanding and our response. There are many fertile examples of how
enemies are made into the Other, dragged symbolically backwards down the
xvi
Introduction
evolutionary ladder until they, and the people who look like them, are no
longer seen as human, but as insect or animal, germ or disease. This comes at
a double cost. First, it fuels the kind of violence that has so horrified us at
Abu Ghraib, furthering the cycles of offense and retaliation. Second, it binds
our imagination into an adversarial pattern that works against the humanity
and creativity required to break free of the kinds of cyclical violence central
to the war on terror.
If metaphor is as crucial to our thinking as this suggests, we need to pay
close attention to the patterns of metaphor at work in our public discourse.
One such pattern is consistently to link terrorism to infestation, corruption,
and spreading decay. Newspaper articles and broadcast news reports are infested with images of infestation, plagued by images of plague. These images
are historically resonant, echoing the language used by the Third Reich to
dehumanize its own hated and feared Others, those disenfranchised from citizenship and ultimately from humanity itself. Over and over, we discover in
the voice of a supposedly neutral media a vocabulary that bypasses the objective and taps directly into the visceral. Even highly-charged or emotional
language can be absorbed by and effectively disappear into the cool, dispassionate tones of a journalist or news anchor. If, however, we look beyond that
neutral tone and scrutinize the language employed in these broadcasts, we often find a disconcerting degree of racism which permits terrorists to be consistently described as vermin, rats, snakes or cockroaches. Most importantly,
this language expands in its application from encompassing individual agents
to encompassing entire nations, entire peoples. This dehumanization of an
entire group or race of people encourages an unconscious transformation in
our minds and imaginations, a transference which is metaphor’s key function,
and in which entire populations are collectively stripped of their humanity
and thus forfeit their claim to our empathy and compassion.
Images of infestation indirectly but inevitably call up a related solution:
extermination. While we might shudder and protest if this were proposed directly, its indirect evocation through metaphor makes this solution start to
seem natural—even clean, hygienic, and sterile. Extermination becomes
more palatable when terrorists no longer have any currency as fundamentally
human. This characterization, through repeated patterns of metaphor, removes any possibility that there could be legitimate grievances behind terrorist acts. Instead, the enemy is portrayed as beasts or insects that, unable to
rationalize, act only out of primal, animal drives. All those sharing the same
ethnicity and religious beliefs become part of the target group. As right-wing
pundit Ann Coulter writes,
Introduction xvii
This is no time to be precious about locating the exact individuals directly involved in this particular terrorist attack. . . . We should invade their countries,
kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity. We weren’t punctilious
about locating and punishing only Hitler and his top officers. We carpetbombed German cities: we killed civilians. That’s war. And this is war.17
The indiscriminate nature of the solution Coulter proposes is, far from being a cure for terrorism, itself a form of terrorism. It promotes violent solutions, and re-directs and escalates levels of violence from single to multiple
targets. She asks us to accept that our mission is fundamental and obvious
enough to justify any methods, and dismisses any thoughtful resistance to the
call to eradication as weakness. More importantly, her rhetoric, while claiming for itself the high moral ground of anti-Nazi efforts in WWII, itself participates in the kind of annihilationist language we are most familiar with in
the kind of Nazi propaganda we now collectively abhor, language that shifts
attention from the identification of “exact individuals” to “their countries,”
urging a movement away from discrimination to the broad and indiscriminate retaliation of the exterminator.
Exterminationism, with its long and ugly history, is not a solution to terrorism. Indeed, across history such policies have triggered greater violence, as
in the genocide in Rwanda, in which people were incited to conduct massacres against different ethnic groups. By promoting extermination tactics as
a way to eliminate terrorism, we contribute to increased violence. We only
need consider the number of car-bombings against American-related targets
in Iraq, increasing numbers of foreign fighters in Iraq and the bomb attacks
in Bali and London in order to recognize that exterminationist ideas, and the
mass killing of both combatants and non-combatants, have not served us
well. Further, when extreme comments such as Coulter’s are accepted as “legitimate commentary”18 within North America and translated and reported
outside North America as representative of Western attitudes toward Islam,
the metaphorical binaries that perpetually divide “us” from “them” are solidified in both camps, fueling an ever-widening cycle of destruction.
The massacres and genocides that comprise our most painful historical moments are characterized by a persistent dehumanization of the enemy. The language that has emerged in the twenty-first century as part of the public face of
the war on terror has helped to fundamentally define that enemy, just as the
metaphors we use reflect and reflexively shape our thinking. When we repeatedly represent our enemies as essentially different in substance from us, as less
than human, we extend ourselves permission to behave in ways that often echo
xviii Introduction
the very violence we condemn. If metaphors affect the way we think and act,
we must take extraordinary care, individually and collectively, with the
metaphors we choose to adopt. We cannot break the cycle of violence by responding to physical violence with violence of speech or image. We may, however, begin to change that cycle by breaking down and examining the
metaphors we employ, by working to understand the reverberations of race and
propaganda that come to us from earlier historical conflicts, and by resisting
those metaphors that urge us towards actions we would otherwise condemn.
This resistance is profoundly important, not only for the sake of the enemy, but
for our own. If we ally ourselves to a rhetoric that strips others of their humanity, it is inevitable that in the process our own will suffer. The multiple
costs of the war on terror mask a broader expense of spirit and community:
when we systematically reduce others, we are ourselves reduced. When we diminish others, we are diminished. It is important to analyze the metaphors that
move us dangerously closer to solutions of eradication and extermination; in
doing so, we can choose to change the direction of this movement through
heightened critical awareness of metaphor’s processes and power.
Notes
1. Darryl Cagle. “Taliban Bugs Windshield.” MSNBC.com. October 30, 2001.
2. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. “Media March to War.” FAIR. September
17, 2001. See www.fair.org/index.php?page=1853 (June 26, 2007).
3. Daniel Pipes. “Sudden Jihad Syndrome.” FrontPageMagazine.com March 14,
2006. See www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID={730A921C-1FED4DCD-9949 -D28A3390317D} (August 1, 2007).
4. Trish Schuh. “Racism and Religious Desecration as U.S. Policy: Islamophobia,
a Retrospective.” Double Standards. 6 May 2006. See www.doublestandards .org/schuh1
.html (June 26, 2007).
5. Talkers Magazine. “Top Talk Personalities,” Talkers Magazine. Spring 2006. See
www.talkers.com/main/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=17&Itemi
d=34> (June 26, 2007).
6. Media Matters for America. “Boortz: Islam is a “deadly virus” and “we’re going to
wait far too long to develop a vaccine to find a way to fight this.” Media Matters for
America. October 18, 2006. See www.mediamatters.org/items/200610180005 (June
26, 2007).
7. New York Post. See www.nypost.com/mediakit/mk/index.php (June 26, 2007).
8. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. op. cit.
9. Paul Stares and Mona Yacoubian. “Terrorism as Virus.” The Washington Post,
August 23, 2005.
10. The Sun (UK). July 30, 2005.
Introduction xix
11. The Calgary Sun. July 17, 2005.
12. Baldilocks. “Spain’s the Target.” March 11, 2004. See baldilocks.typepad.com
/baldilocks/2004/03/spains_the_targ.html (June 26, 2007).
13. Joan Mckinney. “Cooksey: Expect Racial Profiling.” Advocate. September 19,
2001.
14. David Goodner. “American Genocide in the Middle East: Three Million and
Counting.” CommonDreams.org. August 8, 2007.
15. Garth S. Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell, Propaganda and Persuasion. Thousand
Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 3rd edition, 1999.
16. Edward Herman. “Power and the Semantics of Terrorism,” Covert Action Information Bulletin, Vol. 26, 1986:13.
17. Cited in Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. “Trading on Fear.” The Guardian,
posted on Commondreams. Saturday, July 12, 2003. See www.commondreams.org/
views03/0712-01.htm (June 26, 2007).
18. Jim Ritter. “Muslims see a growing media bias.” Chicago Sun Times. September
4, 2006.
P A R T
O N E
METAPHOR MATTERS
C H A P T E R
O N E
Weaponizing Words:
Metaphor and War
The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man.
—José Ortega y Gasset
Metaphors matter. We choose our words from within a dominant system or
frame of metaphor that offers us a specific lexicon of language, that defines
words in certain specific ways, and that shapes both the “what” and the
“how” of our communication. In this way, figuratively and often literally,
through metaphor we make meaning. Our most common metaphors help us
to understand problems and conflicts in certain ways, offering us certain
available responses, and negating or obscuring others. Metaphor operates in
the realm of thought, but its workings reverberate in concrete, active, tangible ways. Metaphor operates through the interplay of language’s denotative
value, what it says clearly and obviously, and its connotative value, what it
evocatively and often subjectively calls up, its overtones, allusions, and associations. Public discourse, which relies on metaphors both obvious and tacit,
can harness its power to shape opinion, set or justify policy, and direct action.
Perhaps this is why, as the philosopher Ortega observes, metaphor is the most
fertile power we know.
The literal meaning of the word metaphor is “to carry over”; metaphor
symbolically transfers aspects of one object to another, even if the objects are
originally in no way connected.1 Through this transference, metaphor shifts
ideas or meanings from one thing to another to achieve “a new, wider, ‘special’ or more precise meaning.”2 With repetition, this happens so adeptly that
3
4
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the transference is invisible and comes to seem inevitable. When the media
repeatedly return, therefore, to similar patterns of image and language, these
patterns begin to appear both familiar and natural. Instead of viewing Muslims as people who have been symbolically portrayed as animals, then, they
begin in our minds to become animals, imaginatively transposed with the images that represented them. This transposition is one of the key effects of
metaphor.
Linguistics, philosophy, and literature have all explored the power of
metaphor in shaping our thinking. Once dismissed as largely decorative, something used to elaborate or “dress up” everyday language, metaphor has been
seen by scholars since the 1970s as playing an important role in forming
thought itself; it is now understood as “an essential aspect of cognition.”3 This
understanding is crucial in times of war: persistent metaphors of beast or plague
reduce individuals to categories and present these categories as innately dangerous to the human, linking the enemy with things beyond or beneath our
own species. Further, they extend the violence of individuals to encompass an
entire culture, a culture portrayed as inherently violent, uncivilized, empty of
our values and our shared concern for the worth of human life.
In whatever ways metaphor has been understood over time, what Ortega
described as its “fertile power” has always been acknowledged. Some rank it
among the most essential forms of public speech: when famous orators like
Cicero advised speakers to use a plain style and be sparing with rhetorical ornament, metaphor was exempted from this rule, since it was seen as common
to everyone. Even simple “rustics,” Cicero noted, use metaphor in speaking
of their “thirsty” fields or “luxuriant” crops.4 Metaphor was historically seen
as appealing directly to the senses. Because of its visual appeal, it illuminates
our ideas: Aristotle observed that metaphor “sets the scene before our eyes.”5
For Aristotle, metaphor enlivens and animates our ideas, making them more
persuasive than if they were expressed plainly. But this very effectiveness of
metaphor can be troubling; some are wary of metaphor’s potent persuasiveness, seeing it as, at best, self-indulgent and over-wrought, at worst as a deliberate movement away from “pure” ideas and therefore always potentially
manipulative or deceptive. Plato argued that an eloquent metaphor simply
helped people to lie more effectively. The poet Paul Verlaine went further,
passionately urging us to “Take eloquence and wring its neck.”6 The fact that
this vigorous sentiment is itself expressed in the form of a metaphor exemplifies metaphor’s pervasiveness and power.
Within a broad understanding of metaphor, it is simply a way to enrich or
enhance our language, a way to make ideas more memorable, artful or attractive. Informally, outside the world of scholarship and the university, this
Weaponizing Words
5
is probably still the most widely used sense of metaphor. Thinking about
metaphor solely as an embellishment or decoration to thought, however,
overlooks a more complex and crucial function of metaphor. Metaphor does
not simply decorate thought by providing an artful expression of pre-existing
ideas. Nor, in a related premise, is metaphor solely the property of public discussion or discourse, used by speech-makers as a tool to make ideas more
palatable, persuasive or compelling. Instead, metaphor enters and influences
all our lives; it does not remain in the province of professional public speech
but permeates individual and collective thought. Far from simply ornamenting or elaborating an idea, metaphor actively influences the thought it helps
to articulate, giving it a form and shape that can define or alter it in fundamental ways.
How might this work? One way to understand this process is to compare
the model of metaphor’s influential function to the broader, popular model of
metaphor’s decorative function, in which metaphor is primarily seen as cosmetic or ornamental. This model has been both widespread and long-lived.
Its roots go back to ancient Greece and Rome, to a period in which students
were trained in rhetoric, the art of speech and persuasion, as an essential skill
of citizenship. In Aristotle’s codification of the arts of language, Terence
Hawkes notes, metaphor is regarded as a “decorative addition” to literal language,7 that is, language that says exactly what it means. Figurative language,
in contrast, uses figures of speech, things which aren’t literally or factually
true, to express an idea. From the classical period to the days of the Romantic poets, literal language was regarded as the language of truth or fact; figurative language was in essence a “fancy” expression of that fact, bedecked
with “extras” such as sparkling wit, gems of expression, or other such elegant
baubles from the rhetorical arts.
Ordinary, everyday, non-figurative language was thus seen as distinct from
metaphor, and was, in Aristotle’s opinion, the home of clarity and real meaning. Metaphor elegantly clothed this workaday language, raising its diction
to a level beyond the commonplace and familiar. A fine metaphor, in this
model, is rather like a set of Sunday clothes for the clear language of ordinary
communication. Like a suit of Sunday best, metaphor decorates only the surface. It’s important to note that, in this model, the idea is seen as existing
first, and the metaphor arrives later to serve that pre-existing idea, making it
appear richer, more elegant, or more appealing, dressing it up and (in both
the literal and the figurative senses) making it presentable. It does not
change the nature of the body wearing it: it can’t make the body taller or
stronger, but it does affect the body’s appearance, lending it an added beauty,
charm or distinction. This analogy assumes that the way in which something
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is expressed does not influence or change what is being said; Aristotle said
clearly that these decorative arts are really only “fanciful” and used to “charm
the hearer”; they do not on any significant level change what he calls the
“bare facts”—that is, presumably, the naked idea, the truths unclothed by the
extra elegance of metaphor.8
The above paragraph employs a metaphor of its own in describing
metaphor’s relation to ideas. It speaks of “dressing up” an idea in the clothes
of metaphor, of how metaphor helps to “flesh out,” enliven, and animate. In
this figure of speech, this metaphoric system or trope, an idea is clearly represented as a body. Related phrases like a “body of evidence” shore up this
metaphoric connection, a connection that is invented rather than natural,
between two things (bodies and ideas) that are not, in themselves, related at
all, but which start to seem connected and, in fact, start to seem like a natural, even inevitable, way to understand each other. We might liken a debate
to a body’s skeleton, for example, when we speak of the “bare bones” of an
argument. A solid argument might be called substantial or “meaty,” adding
flesh to this skeleton of ideas. If we are suspicious of an argument, we might
resist it, keeping it out of our bodily system by finding it “hard to swallow,”
or we might expel it from our body of ideas, finding it “hard to stomach.”
Why should we pay attention to such a metaphor? Is it really significant
that this series of metaphors so clearly links thought to a physical body? If the
answer is yes, then we need to pose another series of questions: what is this
significance? What does it mean to conceive of thought as a body? Does employing such a consistent trope make any real difference to our thinking?
Many scholars of linguistics, psychology, and philosophy argue that it does.
In particular, those who analyze the gender, race and class aspects of such paradigms emphasize the significance of metaphor. For example, if we extend
the body paradigm to include the state (as when we speak of the body politic,
the head of state, the arm of the law), then those traditionally associated
with the “higher order” qualities of the head are valued over those traditionally associated with the heart. When we speak of a “head” of state we simultaneously reflect and ratify what we value in a leader: reason and intelligence, for example, over intuition and empathy. Other parts of the body
perform functions every bit as crucial to survival as those performed by the
organs we venerate or romanticize, but we do not acknowledge them in our
metaphors of bodily governance, which suggests the complex interactions
between metaphors, ideas and, perhaps most importantly, values.
Lakoff and Johnson’s influential book Metaphors We Live By discusses the
ways in which metaphors influence both our thinking and behavior. They argue that our experience of the world is structured, not just described, by our
Weaponizing Words
7
“conceptual systems,” and they contend that most of our conceptual systems
are essentially metaphorical.9 The concepts that govern thought are not just
matters of the intellect; they also govern our everyday functioning, down to
the most mundane details. Our conceptual systems structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people,
playing a central role in defining our everyday realities. If our conceptual system is largely metaphorical, then the way we think, what we experience, and
what we do every day is very much a matter of metaphor.10
One of the most important reasons to pay careful attention to the relationship between metaphors and thought is that this relationship is often
largely invisible. While some metaphors have an overt or obvious influence,
the influence of others can be much more subtle and oblique. Our conceptual systems are “not something we are normally aware of. In most of the little things we do every day, we simply think and act more or less automatically along certain lines. Just what these lines are is by no means obvious.”11
Since the way we communicate emerges from the same conceptual systems
out of which we think and act, an examination of our language becomes especially crucial in analyzing and interpreting that system.
Metaphorical concepts such as “argument is war,” say Lakoff and Johnson,
do not just influence the way we speak, they also govern the way we act. Our
language is full of phrases that suggest the conflation of war and argument:
we merge the two ideas, making them appear the same even though they are
literally distinct. The barrage of linguistic correlations between war and argument gives ample evidence for this claim; we may speak of a good argument as “annihilating” an opponent, of “shooting down” ideas, of “defending” our points, or of finding a position “indefensible.” We almost inevitably
speak of “winning” or “losing” an argument or debate. And, of course, the
previous sentence echoes this language, speaking of the list of examples as a
“barrage,” as if they were artillery instead of a series of observations, ammunition instead of illustration. This illustrates metaphoric transference or conflation: ideas and weapons are separate things, but the familiarity of this
metaphor has so fused the two in our speech and imaginations that they begin, fundamentally, to merge.
The War Metaphor
The phrase “the war on terror” has been used so frequently that it is deeply entrenched in our thinking, so deeply that we might not realize that the phrase
itself is not a description but a metaphor. The use of the war metaphor should
be approached with caution, especially in the case of the war on terror. As with
8
Chapter One
the influential phrase “The War on Drugs,” widely used by the White House
in the 1980s and 1990s, to say we are at war with something immediately invokes certain associations. It reduces an imposingly large, abstract, or disconcertingly complex problem to a well-defined, simplified, and ultimately manageable entity. It is difficult in a literal sense to be at war with something as
opposed to someone, but by invoking the war metaphor, that “something,” be
it drugs or terror, is personified. Once the opposing idea is personified,
metaphorically mutated into something approximating a human enemy, it appears possible to defeat that enemy, to achieve the clear triumph that would
not be possible in battling either abstract concepts or complex and daunting
social problems. The lure of such a promised victory proves almost irresistible;
it calls up the feelings of triumph, clarity, and righteous response that so often
elude us in considering hard-to-solve problems. Although war may evoke a
range of horrific associations, it also has a compelling appeal; an “appropriate”
war on an appropriately framed enemy can actually be more comforting than
frightening. As Michael Erard notes, a phrase like “the war on terror” subtly
“encodes a frame in which an intangible terror can be targeted or conquered.”
The success of this strategic frame depends on “the martial fantasy of inevitable
victory.”12 It comes to seem almost ignoble not to answer the war metaphor’s
call to arms. The imagery around the figurative war often participates in a lofty
range of speech, calling up, through images of flags, banners, and bands of
brothers, the sentiments we feel for nation, community, identity, and other
such potent values. Jayne Docherty and Frank Blechman, scholars in the field
of conflict resolution, urge that the war metaphor should be used with caution:
“Every metaphor is a way of seeing the world and every metaphor is also a way
of not seeing the world. If we lock onto a single description of the problem and
the appropriate response too early, we may not discover the most effective
long-term responses to a crisis.”13 If we jettison the war metaphor in favor of
another, new analogies might lead to new possibilities for response and resolution.
Why has the White House narrowed its metaphorical message so successfully that the war metaphor has largely over-taken all others? Why has the media echoed and replicated this metaphor in all its coverage? One answer to that
question lies in the appeal, not of war itself, but of what the metaphor of war
calls up. Erard notes that the phrase “war on terror” deliberately recycles a Cold
War frame “in which we waged war on another intangible, Communism. And
we won!” The promise of the phrase “the war on terror” is that “we can win
this one, too.” It invokes a national history of confident military strength:
“America, after all, wins its wars.”14 Beyond the powerful appeal to a triumphalist history of the allusion to narratives of victory, the war metaphor
Weaponizing Words
9
promises something that is perhaps equally powerful: the simplification of the
complex, the clarification of the subtle.
There is a certain clarifying quality to an extreme metaphor such as the
metaphor of war that makes it potentially very attractive. War has the ability to focus issues, framing them definitively and inarguably. The public rage
directed against those who questioned the war on terror in its early days is
evidence of this: simply to question the appropriateness of this frame was
seen as unpatriotic, even traitorous. One of the clearest examples of the war
metaphor calling up the language of treason to brand sceptics is found in the
response to an article penned by noted essayist Susan Sontag in the September 24, 2001 issue of The New Yorker. Sontag argued that the attacks of 9/11
needed to be understood within the broader context of decades of American
foreign policy in the Middle East; in return, she was publicly denounced as a
“quisling,” a “fifth columnist,” even a “pathetic ayatollah of hate.” Political
commentator Andrew Sullivan even invented a prize, the Susan Sontag
award, for pillorying what he saw as the worst outpourings of the left.15
Similarly, John Edwards, candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, was also called a traitor when he repudiated the notion that there is
a “global war on terror,” calling this metaphorical framing an ideological doctrine advanced by the Bush administration. In a May 2007 defense policy
speech, Edwards called the war on terror a “bumper sticker” slogan used by
Bush to justify everything from abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison to the invasion of Iraq. “By framing this as a war,” Edwards said, “we have walked right
into the trap the terrorists have set—that we are engaged in some kind of
clash of civilizations and a war on Islam.” His statements were immediately
denounced: on the conservative web site Townhall.com a reader wrote “All
you anti-war traitors should hang. We are at war because there is an enemy
that initiated the war. After that any speech that gives aid and comfort and
encouragement to the enemy should be hanged as a traitor.”16
The war metaphor has also allowed the use of the term “Fifth Column”
which disparages dissenters thought to pose an internal threat. Fifth columnists are traitors who act out of sympathy with the enemy to undermine a nation’s solidarity from within. The term is currently being used by those on the
political right to cast aspersions on academics and intellectuals who criticize
the government by teaching the literature and politics of the Middle East.
On the August 21, 2006, broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show,
Bill O’Reilly told his 3.5 million listeners17 that “the Bush administration is
in a war not only with the terrorists, but also with the far left in this country.” Discussing the Bush administration’s domestic surveillance program,
which was recently struck down as unconstitutional by a federal district court
10
Chapter One
judge, O’ Reilly described the “far left” as the “fifth column in this country.”18
Once the conceptual structure of war has been evoked, it casts any dissent
into a particularly negative, destructive light. Voices of difference are figured
as dangerous, destructive, even traitorous: once we have war, it seems, we
have traitors.
Just as wars involve two clearly defined sides, so the metaphor of war enticingly promises a clear narrative of aggressors and victims, winners and losers, soldiers and insurgents. Immediately after September 11, the war
metaphor seemed, at first glance, to be reasonable: after all, the attack on the
Pentagon was against a military target, the attacks were intended to challenge American economic and military power, and the level of damage made
the south end of Manhattan look very much like a war zone, with all the attendant horror and chaos. However, other aspects of the attack do not fit this
framing as well: The World Trade Center was not a military target; the attack vehicles were not military weapons; the attack was carried out entirely
within this country; and, perhaps most importantly, the attackers did not represent the policy of another sovereign state. As events unfold, many commentators have cast doubts on the war metaphor, arguing that this is not (or
should not be) a war against Islam, just against violent Islamic fundamentalists. These observers argue that the false clarity of the war metaphor effectively masks the many uncertainties and ambiguities of the War on Terror.
For example, a sweepingly categorical term such as “enemy” can be used to
obscure the fact that in this conflict the enemy is not a specifically national
or a specifically religious one. As critics of the war on terror remind us, we
need to beware of false logical propositions such as “All terrorists are Muslims therefore all Muslims are terrorists.”19 In the war on terror, the identification of the enemy has been increasingly difficult and problematic. Is the
enemy terror itself? How is such an abstraction to be fought? What territory
can be gained in such a hypothetical battle? What will be the front lines in
this terrain of abstraction and symbolism?
In spite of its difficulties, the war metaphor has remained dominant. If we
are in a war, then we have a specific lexicon or vocabulary to draw upon. Like
the lexicon of any metaphorical system, this one does not simply describe
things, but shapes the way we see them: our vocabulary guides our thinking,
urging us to interpret events according to and within the frame of that language. The lexicon of war raises the stakes of the discussion and generates intensity: war, after all, is about our very survival. What is this lexicon? Its
nouns crucially define identities: “our side” has “an enemy” who becomes
“the enemy.” We have “adversaries” and “antagonists.” These nouns define
the people and countries involved in conflict primarily in terms of opposi-
Weaponizing Words
11
tion: we are defined by who we are against, and our opponents are defined as
our opposites; both sides are thus locked into roles of essential difference and
eternal opposition. The verbs in our lexicon of war also perform this kind of
ideological work. In war, we “attack,” “defend,” “strike,” and “engage” the enemy; we develop tactics and strategic objectives and employ “necessary
means.” The verbs of war allow for glorious activity: we are not passive but
active, not acted upon but acting. The verbs of war are, frankly, rather exciting: they support a sense of progress and movement, while they negate any
undesirable self-picturing of ourselves as hesitant, static, or uncertain. They
replace the role of victim with the more potent role of aggressive defender.
In this vocabulary, we are defined as hunter rather than prey, warrior rather
than victim. Even the adjectives of war have a significant effect: soldiers are
strong, active, powerful agents, while civilians are less than this: less experienced, less knowing, less involved in the conflict first-hand, and therefore
less deserving of a voice.
The lexicon of war tacitly endorses the military’s valuing of hierarchy and
authority. Within this model, as citizens, part of the price of our recovered
security is to defer to those in government and military who are seen as experts in the necessary deployments of war. This is significant because, in war,
civilians have a limited importance relative to the martial arena: their job is
to support the troops, not to question. The success of the war, we are told, requires singleness of vision and voice; a nation at war requires a harmonious
chorus of support from its citizens, not a cacophony of dissenting voices. Any
voice raised in protest, and thus out of tune with the prevailing chorus, is silenced, excoriated, or expelled. Voices of resistance or questioning are told,
as the Dixie Chicks were famously told by an angry fan, to “shut up and
sing.”20
In this way the discourse of war enlists us into particular roles, and offers little space for the creative re-casting of these roles. The war metaphor offers the
promise of victorious domination and protection: it implies we can so thoroughly defeat our enemies that we can keep them from ever hurting us again.
This is a suspect promise, however; we have never successfully managed to
fight the war to end all wars, and so clearly the closure and finality implicitly
offered by the war metaphor is at least in part wishful thinking. Docherty argues that the war on terror will be no exception: the difficulties of identifying
and locating the terrorist perpetrators will make a final reprisal difficult, and
the very military attacks that create refugees will create new enemies emerging
from the crowded refugee camps, perpetuating “the cycle of fear and terror for
our children and grandchildren.”21 The war metaphor thus serves us poorly
pragmatically and strategically as well as ideologically: we hamper ourselves if
12
Chapter One
we assume we understand the nature and motivation of our enemies, or if we
assume we can predict their response to our activities. We hamper ourselves
further if we don’t examine the contexts and conditions that have given rise to
the world’s escalating cycles of unrest and violence.
Another important aspect of the war metaphor is its inherent selfjustification. It offers us a model that is reactive: our retaliation is right
and, indeed, inevitable. We were given no choice in the matter, we might
say to ourselves; we are in a war, this paradigm suggests, because others
have declared war on us. Morally, the war metaphor risks everything a society builds by over-focusing resources on the war effort: “The great challenge of this metaphor is that it carries an all-or-nothing element. ‘If you
are not for war, you must be for doing nothing.’ Without alternative models, critics of war do look weak and indecisive. Alternative metaphors are
so badly needed.”22
Many who urge a cautious, critical, or reflective attitude towards the war
on terror emphasize not only the metaphor’s ideological work, but its powerful political effect. Lakoff and Frisch argue that the war metaphor was primarily adopted for political reasons. Susan Sontag argues that because of its
indefinite “enemy,” the anti-terror war can never end, a “sign that it is not a
war, but, rather, a mandate for expanding the use of American power.”23 The
war metaphor allows for this expansion of power: when the government declares war on cancer or poverty or drugs it means the government is asking
that new forces be mobilized to address the problem but when the government declares war on terrorism, it is giving itself permission to do what it
wants. “When it wants to intervene somewhere, it will. It will brook no limits to its power.”24 The war metaphor negates any other non-military possibility as a way to defend the country. Since national security is inextricably
tied to the war’s success, to be against the war is to be against the nation’s
very survival, and therefore to be a national threat. Within the war
metaphor, any hesitation to support the war becomes unpatriotic.
While the war metaphor encourages the government to “do what it
wants” internally, an equally important feature is the war metaphor’s repressive powers domestically. Lakoff and Frisch insist that the war metaphor puts
dissenters on the defensive, since hesitation to give the President fuller authority opens critics and Congress to charges of defeatism, weakness, and
lack of patriotism. Once the military extends the field of battle, the war
metaphor creates a new literal reality, one that substantiates and reinforces
the original metaphor. The war metaphor offers the President enlarged
wartime powers and confers on him an “extraordinary domestic power” to
fulfill the “agenda of the radical right” in moving resources away from social
Weaponizing Words
13
needs towards military needs in over-riding environmental safeguards, and in
establishing systems of surveillance and intimidation to influence both enemies and citizens.25 Since “war trumps all other topics,” the war metaphor often expands powers not just in the international but in domestic arenas,
granting the President a degree of power over political discussion as well as
action.26 Sontag’s editorial echoes these concerns, arguing for the explicit
connection of the war metaphor to the subjugation of free, open political debate. Framing America’s post-911 foreign policy as “actions undertaken in
war time,” she says, acts as “a powerful disincentive” to critical discussion: in
the aftermath of the attacks, individuals objecting to “the jihad language
used by the American government (good versus evil, civilization versus barbarism) were accused of condoning the attacks, or at least the legitimacy of
the grievances behind the attacks.”27 Because the war metaphor elevates
virtues such as solidarity and unanimity, even a simple call to reflectiveness
“is equated with dissent, dissent with lack of patriotism.”28 Within this
model, reflection sides with the enemy, acting as a challenge to the “moral
clarity” required to sustain a war.
The importance of how things are defined, then, cannot be underestimated. Frank Luntz advises right-wing organizations which words work best
to sell their ideas to the public. He is credited with making estate taxes appear less palatable when he suggested they be re-named “death taxes.”
Through focus-group research, Luntz found that “estate tax” wasn’t an objectionable concept to the majority of the public; it evoked a sense of
wealthy people having to pay their fair share. The term “death tax,” however,
kindled voter resentment, calling up an image of government intruding into
private family grief to snatch away the savings citizens wanted to pass along
to loved ones. This word change had significant political impact: by provoking an outcry from a public who for the most part wouldn’t be paying any significant amount in death taxes, the net result was a tax break for the wealthiest Americans. After the introduction of the new phrase, public support
helped the Congress to repeal the tax. Economists observe that the repeal of
the tax may cost more than a trillion dollars in lost revenue that could be
used for much-needed social programs. Small words, then, clearly carry large
consequences. In June 2004, Luntz wrote a memo for the Bush administration entitled Communicating the Principles of Prevention & Protection in the
War on Terror, which offered guidance on specific language to use when talking about the war in Iraq. He notes:
this document is intended to create a lexicon for explaining the policy of “preemption” and the “War in Iraq.” However, you will not find any instance in
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Chapter One
which we suggest that you use the actual word “preemption,” or the phrase
“The War in Iraq” to communicate your policies to the American public. To
do so is to undermine your message from the start. Preemption may be the right
policy, and Iraq the right place to start. But those are not the right words to
use.29
His advice was to connect the war on terror to the war in Iraq by ensuring
that “no speech about homeland security or Iraq should begin without a reference to 9/11.” Luntz’s recommended phrases such as “It is better to fight the
War on Terror on the streets of Baghdad than on the streets of New York or
Washington” and “9/11 changed everything,” became staples of Republican
rhetoric. Luntz acknowledged the influence of the war paradigm, and how essential it was to domestic political control, when he stated that invoking the
war on terror would establish the conditions for Bush’s electoral win in 2004.
“If the public sees what the President’s doing as a war on terror, he wins. If
they see it as a war on Iraq, Kerry wins. What is the context of what the President is doing? Define it one way, you have one outcome; define it another
way, you have a different outcome.”30
Luntz’s words suggest that governments may rise or fall on the meaning of
a word, and that this meaning is determined by the context or frame in
which the word circulates. The largest framing of the war on terror is a frame
of race, and thus our most demeaning language and our harshest representations are reserved for those marked as racially Other. Evidence for this assertion can be found in the difference of language used to talk about internal
voices of difference and those external Others who, as we draw them through
our metaphoric language, are not just different but are defined by their difference. While the language used to denounce the “traitors” who publicly question the war on terror and American foreign policy is punitive, it still allows
a basic humanity to those it denounces. “Quislings” are cowards, but they are
cowardly persons; fifth columnists are dangerous and subversive, but dangerous and subversive people. These accusations attack groups’ or individuals’
actions, and the language of the accusations addresses these actions rather
than the fundamental identity of the actor, who remains a fundamentally human agent. This goes against our historical sense that traitors are the worst
kind of enemy because they destroy from within. Traditionally, traitors are
seen as far worse than external enemies. But the language of the war on terror does not bear this out. Internal critics, while traitors, are allowed their
humanity; the language and images associated with Arab terrorists, in comparison, relentlessly strips that humanity away. It achieves this by inextricably linking the “enemy other” with the animal—and not just any animal, but
what we consider to be the lowest order of animal. War in general encour-
Weaponizing Words
15
ages imagery that debases the enemy, as following chapters will show; perhaps the most important reason to resist the war metaphor, then, is that it
goes forward upon a sustained and seductive dehumanization of the enemy
that, if we continue to indulge it, risks reducing our own humanity.
Notes
1. Terence Hawkes. Metaphor. London: Methuen. 1972: 1.
2. Terence Hawkes. Metaphor. London: Methuen. 1972: 1.
3. Ellen Winner. The Point of Words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press,
1988: 17.
4. Brian Vickers. In Defense of Rhetoric. New York City: Clarendon Paperbacks.
1989: 299.
5. Brian Vickers. In Defense of Rhetoric. New York City: Clarendon Paperbacks.
1989: 299.
6. Paul Verlaine. “Art Poétique.” Aesthetic Realism. See www.aestheticrealism.net/
poetry/art-poetique.htm (June 26, 2007).
7. Terence Hawkes. Metaphor.
8. Cited in Terence Hawkes. Metaphor.
9. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 2nd edition, 1980: 4.
10. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By.
11. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Metaphors We Live By.
12. Michael Erard. “Frame Wars.” Texas Observer. Posted on Alternet. November
18, 2004. See www.alternet.org/election04/20537/ (June 26, 2007).
13. Jayne Docherty. “Revisiting the War Metaphor.” Beyond September 11. September 25, 2001. See http://www.emu.edu/ctp/bse-metaphor2.html (June 26, 2007).
14. Michael Erard. “Frame Wars.”
15. Michael Bronski. “Brain drain: In defense of Susan Sontag, Noam Chomsky,
and Gore Vidal.” The Phoenix.com. September 19, 2002. See 72.166.46.24/boston/
news_features/other_stories/multipage/documents/02441651.htm (June 26, 2007).
16. Peter Wehner. “John Edwards’s irresponsible and revealing address.” Townhall.
May 24, 2007. See www.townhall.com/columnists/PeterWehner/2007/05/24/john_
edwardss _irresponsible_and_revealing_address (June 26, 2007).
17. Project for Excellence in Journalism. “Annual Report on American Journalism,
2007.” The State of the News Media. Spring 2007. See www.stateofthenewsmedia
.org/2007/ (June 26, 2007).
18. Media Matters for America. “O’Reilly: The Bush administration is in a war not
only with the terrorists, but also with the far left in this country.” Media Matters for
America. Aug. 23, 2006. See mediamatters.org/items/200608240001 (June 26, 2007).
19. Abdel Rahman al-Rashed. “Innocent religion is now a message of hate.” Telegraph (UK). September 5, 2004.
20. Barbara Kopple. Shut Up and Sing. 2006. Videorecording.
16
Chapter One
21. Jayne Docherty. “Four Reasons to Use the War Metaphor with Caution.” Beyond September 11. See www.emu.edu/ctp/bse-metaphor.html (June 26, 2007).
22. Frank Blechman and Jayne Seminare Docherty. “Frameworks other than war.”
23. Susan Sontag. “Real Battles and Empty Metaphors.” New York Times. September 10, 2002.
24. Susan Sontag. “Real Battles and Empty Metaphors.”
25. George Lakoff and Evan Frisch. “Five Years After 9/11: Drop the War Metaphor.”
26. George Lakoff and Evan Frisch. “Five Years After 9/11: Drop the War Metaphor.”
27. Susan Sontag. “Real Battles and Empty Metaphors.”
28. Susan Sontag. “Real Battles and Empty Metaphors.”
29. Michael Erard. “Frame Wars.”
30. Michael Erard. “Frame Wars.”
C H A P T E R
T W O
Making Enemies:
Propaganda and the Making
of the Orientalist “Other”
Imagine for yourself “the enemy” as a man of resentment conceives
him—and right here we have his action, his creation: he has conceptualized “the evil enemy,” “the evil one,” as a fundamental idea—and from
that he now thinks his way to an opposite image and counterpart, a
“good man”—himself!
—Friedrich Nietzche1
Propaganda
Propaganda is the fuel that feeds the machinery of war. It is key in generating
the public support that is one of war’s most essential requirements. If metaphor
helps construct our reality, then propaganda is one of the chief materials in that
construction. The frames through which we see the world are built from the
language propaganda offers us, and that the media, echoing it, ratifies. Support
for war is much more powerful when it is emotional or visceral than when it is
logical or intellectual; likewise, the war on terror depends on our “feeling”
more than our “knowing.” This is made especially clear when we consider how
much misunderstanding and outright error has surrounded the war. When, in
January 2002, the Knight-Ridder newspaper company sponsored an opinion
poll, it reported that while two-thirds of the respondents claimed they had a
good grasp of the issues surrounding the war, “closer questioning revealed large
gaps in that knowledge,” including serious errors of fact. For example, fully half
of those surveyed thought that one or more of the 9/11 terrorists were Iraqi
17
18
Chapter Two
when, in reality, not one of the terrorists was an Iraqi citizen.2 The survey’s results suggest that the more knowledge people possessed about events surrounding the war, the less likely they were to take a fierce, aggressive, or militaristic
stance. Survey authors noted significantly that “Those who show themselves
to be most knowledgeable about the Iraq situation are significantly less likely
to support military action.”3
Propaganda is not concerned with disseminating information but with rallying emotion. Information is a distraction from propaganda’s fundamental
work: it is not intended to enlarge our understanding of complex issues but
to narrow it, so that we will be both focused and manageable. Propaganda’s
intent is not to educate but to generate and direct emotion, to boil the blood
while it narrows the mind. Its most essential task, and its most dangerous, is
to ensure that public emotion dominates public discussion.
Propaganda is the mechanism by which governments persuade the public
of the evil of the enemy and the justness of its own cause. When propaganda
spreads through public discourse, flowing from government spokespeople
through the news media to the internet and television, re-articulated by news
anchors and columnists, bloggers and talk show hosts, it inevitably influences
public opinion. Influence, after all, is propaganda’s purpose. The facts, for
propagandists, merely confuse the issue, weakening the clarity required to
create and sustain moral certainty. For the machinery of war to run smoothly,
propaganda must be pure, distilled, and unpolluted by contaminants such as
complexity or subtlety. While we may naturally associate clarity with knowledge, propaganda implicitly asserts the opposite: the more we know, the
greater our confusion, hesitation, and ambivalence; the less we know, the
more strongly and clearly we can feel.
We need, therefore, to be aware of the ways in which propaganda suppresses information, not overtly, as in policies of censorship, but subtly. The
silencing effect is the same in both censorship and propaganda; the difference
is that the censored generally know they are being censored, while those subjected to expert propaganda are often unaware of it. In the study of propaganda, scholars typically differentiate between how propaganda works differently in a controlled society than in an open society. Noam Chomsky states
that “Propaganda is to democracy what violence is to totalitarianism.”4 In
the controlled society, propaganda is obvious, and its very obviousness allows
a stance of silent resistance or dismissal; it may be tolerated for fear of
reprisal, but citizens recognize it for what it is. In contrast, in a more open society like America, says Nancy Snow, “the hidden and integrated nature of
the propaganda best convinces people that they are not being manipulated.”5
For Americans, argues Snow, propaganda is something associated with dictators: “it is not supposed to be part of an open society.”6
Making Enemies 19
Evidence of propaganda at work in closed societies is easy to come by.
Hitler’s propaganda machine was legendary, and relied on one of the twentieth century’s most influential practitioners of public relations, Edward
Bernays. Bernays, the nephew of Sigmund Freud, merged Freud’s work in individual psychology with his own brand of social psychology, using public
opinion polls, advertising, and other means of persuasion to political ends. In
his early books Crystallizing Public Opinion (1923) and Propaganda (1928), he
spoke of constructing the “necessary illusions” that could be delivered to the
public as reality in order to achieve what he famously called the “engineering of consent.”7 Joseph Goebbels used Bernays’ work as the basis for his
propaganda in the 1930s.8 Herman Goering was blunt about how easy it is to
control public sentiment about war, whether in a democracy or a dictatorship. Acknowledging that “of course the people don’t want war,” he added,
“but it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.
Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the
leaders.” All that is necessary, said Goering, is to “tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the
country to greater danger.”9
The engineering of consent wasn’t limited to European dictatorships.
American President Woodrow Wilson relied on Bernays and influential journalist Walter Lippmann in 1917 to reverse America’s reluctance to enter
WWI. Bernays’ famous slogan “Make the World Safe for Democracy” effectively reversed the tide of public opinion, creating a band-wagon effect so
strong that to question it was seen as dangerously unpatriotic. The propaganda
of the current war on terror remains equally effective in marshalling opinion,
relying equally heavily on hired experts. PR consultant John Rendon, who has
worked extensively for the Pentagon and CIA on supplying language for public discussions of Iraq, referred to himself in a 1996 speech as “an information
warrior and a perception manager.”10 Managing perception included such
tasks as supplying American flags for Kuwaitis to wave in televised scenes of
U.S. Marines entering Kuwait City at the end of the Gulf War; these scenes,
aired on news broadcasts all over the world, sent a strong visual message about
the welcome of the marines as liberators.11 “Did you ever stop to wonder,”
Rendon asked, “how the people of Kuwait City, after being held hostage for
seven long and painful months, were able to get hand-held American flags?
. . . Well, you now know the answer. That was one of my jobs.”12
Propaganda speaks to two audiences. As misinformation, it is intended to
confuse and mislead the enemy, supplying false facts and obscuring truth.
This kind of disinformation has always been part of warfare; Alexander the
Great purportedly left huge pieces of armour behind his retreating troops to
20
Chapter Two
“convince the enemy that his soldiers were giants.”13 But perhaps propaganda
is most pernicious when directed towards a domestic audience. As Jacques Ellul observes, propaganda is always at its most effective when it is least noticeable.14 Critics of the war on terror state that the American public has
been manipulated and deceived by “a covert disinformation campaign” orchestrated by professional Public Relations consultants whose job is to “spin”
the war and government messages to the public.15 This is done in the name
of the public good as a way of offering clarity; for example, in October 2001
Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said that “we need to do a better job to
make sure that people are not confused as to what this is about.”16 President
Bush echoed this when, on May 24, 2005, he said, “See in my line of work
you got to keep repeating things over and over and over again for the truth
to sink in, to kind of catapult the propaganda.”17
The interplay between clarity, confusion, and complexity in public discourse is important to observe in the language of propaganda. Most people
are familiar with some of the phrases used by government representatives to
downplay certain words’ real meanings: the distant and technical-sounding
“collateral damage” softens the harsh reality of “killed civilians,” while the
more benign-sounding “friendly fire” replaces the more brutal “shot down by
his own side.” Collateral damage, says Tom Engelhardt, is a phrase used to
downplay slaughter and carnage; carnage “is always portrayed by the military
as justified and the death of civilians, if finally admitted, invariably as ‘accidental’ in pursuit of the enemy; hence, ‘collateral damage.’”18 Even an apparently neutral term like “non-combatant,” while apparently acting simply as
a synonym for “civilian,” suggests a very different connotation. The word
civilian connotes a non-soldier, someone separate from the battle and therefore not a legitimate target. Civilians are the opposite of soldiers, but noncombatants are not the opposites of combatants, and could become combatants at any moment. The word non-combatant, looked at in this way, implies
an activity rather than an essential condition, an activity that might suddenly change. The condition of not-fighting seems a more temporary state
than the condition being a civilian. The term non-combatants seems to warrant less sympathy or compassion than the word civilian invites. This is reflected in the findings of a Pentagon survey of U.S. soldiers and marines in
Iraq, based on interviews with 1,767 troops, in which only 47 percent of soldiers and 38 percent of marines felt Iraqi non-combatants should be treated
with dignity and respect as required by the Geneva Conventions. Strikingly,
only half of those polled said they would report a member of their unit for
killing or injuring a non-combatant.19 This is reflected in the events at Haditha, in which an internal military investigation determined that U.S.
Making Enemies 21
marines killed as many as 24 Iraqis—including women and children—in the
city of Haditha in November 2005 and then attempted a cover-up.20 The victims included “a 76-year-old amputee in a wheelchair holding a Koran, a
mother and child bent over as if in prayer,” and children as young as one year
old. Such brutalities are clearly linked to the ways in which enemies are constructed; as Engelhardt observes, it’s a small step “from the knowledge that
the enemy might be anywhere to the thought that the enemy is everywhere,
and then to the feeling that every Vietnamese/Iraqi is an enemy.” In the
slaughter of civilians at My Lai, during the Vietnam War, one soldier on trial
confirmed this perspective, noting that “even a baby sucking at its mother’s
breast” might “be helping to conceal a hidden grenade.”21
This willingness to kill civilians without compunction is not just a feature
of soldiers, produced by dangers of being in the field. It also finds a fierce echo
in media commentators and columnists back home. An article by Ben Shapiro
at TownHall.com highlights how the two terms are freighted with meaning. In
an column entitled “Enemy ‘civilian casualties’ ok by me,” Shapiro says he is
“getting really sick of people who whine about ‘civilian casualties.’ Maybe I’m
a hard-hearted guy, but when I see in the newspapers that civilians in
Afghanistan or the West Bank were killed by American or Israeli troops, I
don’t really care. In fact, I would rather that the good guys use the Air Force to
kill the bad guys, even if that means some civilians get killed along the way.
One American soldier is worth far more than an Afghan civilian.”22 Shapiro
goes on to argue that the term non-combatant is misleading, criticizing The New
York Times and other papers as “disingenuous” for calling Afghan non-combatants “civilians,” because, in doing so, they suggest that all civilians are somehow the same. Shapiro is clear that Afghan and American civilians are not at
all equal: “American civilians are people who go about their daily lives without providing cover for terrorists or giving them money. Afghan civilians are
not,”23 so “frankly, it doesn’t matter to me if some of their ‘civilians’ get killed
for involvement with the enemy.”24 By this logic, Afghans can never be truly
citizens nor can they be non-combatants, because they are fundamentally always “involved with the enemy.” They are always guilty, therefore always fair
game. This view is echoed by a blogger who posted this view:
Hunt down every member of ETA, AlQ, PFLP, IRA and every other bunch of
sonsabitches that ever sets off a bomb and kill them. Kill them until they fear
us more than they love whatever twisted cause they serve. If it takes killing
their families down to their goddamned pet hamsters that’s fine with me.25
This sense of the fundamental and essential guilt of the enemy allows for the
perpetration of atrocities both public and private. The infamous Abu Ghraib
22
Chapter Two
photos of American soldiers torturing and humiliating Iraqis are one example
of private acts made public. While there has been public condemnation of
these photos, there have also been attempts to turn them back into private
acts. If they’re private, after all, they can be distanced from national governments; they are not a product of deliberately racist rhetoric, but instead the actions of a few individuals, a couple of bad apples. In a speech to the U.S. House
of Representatives, Congressman Jim McDermott chronicles this process of
trying to limit damage and make the abuse a singular, anomalous event. “I have
been watching the hearings over in the Senate,” said McDermott,
the effort to limit this and say it is just seven or eight young people and perhaps a couple of lieutenants up the line but really it is a rogue operation, is simply not true. It runs all the way to the top. The decisions here have to be signed
off. Anybody who has been in the military knows about the chain of command, and somebody does not sign off down at the lieutenant level and not
bother to send it up to the captain or to the colonel or to the general. They all
go up the line. They have all been signed off, one way or another, or somebody
at the top said here is a blank check, do whatever you want.26
The attempt to make these actions appear to be those of private individuals
has been furthered by many media voices. A British Broadcasting Corporation
broadcaster described the photos as “merely mementos”—“Something one
would laugh about in the family and then paste in the family album.”27 The
family album is a private space, a catalogue of the domestic and personal; that
the Abu Ghraib photos can be treated as “merely” private, idiosyncratic “mementos” is a pernicious attempt to refute the systematic racism of current military policy. Ahdaf Soueif, a prominent Egyptian writer living in the UK,
writes scathingly in The Guardian that the news and photographs emerging
from Iraq show a progression of Western dehumanization of the Arab: “In the
past year the world has seen photos of many Iraqis stripped with their wrists
tied behind their backs with plastic cord. At first we could look into their eyes
and bear witness to what was happening. Then they were bagged. At no point
was there an outcry. We have grown used to seeing Arab men bound and
hooded.”28 Soueif tells another story of the “private” family memento, a personal souvenir photo of a young American soldier in Iraq. In this photo,
There is no nakedness or torture, but it is no less nasty for that. The boys are
holding a cardboard sign. They and the soldier are smiling and doing a thumbs
up. He is pointing at the cardboard sign, on which he’s written: “Lcpl
Boudreaux killed my Dad. then he knocked up my sister!” Imagine the scene:
Lance Corporal Boudreaux, a soldier on a liberating, civilizing mission, asks
Making Enemies 23
the natives to pose for a “memento”. He gives them the sign to hold. What lie
did he tell them about its message? “Iraq is liberated”, or “Mission accomplished”? And who, in this scene, is the more civilized?29
The contrast of the two families implied by this scene is poignant and horrifying; what idea does it inspire of the hypothetical American family back
home, willing to find such a souvenir amusing, ready to be made proud of
their boy for his exploits? The idea that anyone could speak of such photos
as “mere” mementos, something to “laugh about in the family” suggests an intensely unflattering understanding of the families back home, believing in
good faith in the moral value of what “our boys” are doing “over there.” And
what of that other family, that murdered father and “knocked up” sister? The
always disturbing conflation of sex and violence aside, the image of the two
Iraqi children flashing a thumbs-up at a sign celebrating the real or imagined
devastation of their family is an apt illustration of what happens when we
stop believing that anyone in the enemy nation can be a civilian. Even children, in this context, can in apparent glee be conscripted into the documentation of their own unknowing humiliation.
Perhaps the most startling linguistic disconnection shows up in the gap
between the labels “freedom fighter” and “terrorist.” In his essay “Media Spin
Revolves around the Word Terrorist,”30 Norman Solomon approvingly cites
Reuter’s policy of avoiding these and other “emotive words.” Since these
terms are intricately tied up with value judgments and political perspectives,
to employ them is not simply to report events but implicitly to evaluate
them. Reuters states that “we do not use terms like ‘terrorist’ and ‘freedom
fighter’ unless they are in a direct quote or are otherwise attributable to a
third party. We do not characterize the subjects of news stories but instead report their actions” so “readers can make their own decisions.”31 While many
of the 160 countries from which Reuters reports have pressured the news
agency to label their enemies as terrorists, an internal memo offered one reason to resist such pressure: “one man’s terrorist,” it observed, “is another
man’s freedom fighter.”32 It is often only when time allows a fuller picture of
political, social, and cultural contexts to emerge that we begin to re-evaluate
these terms; it was the development of just such a larger international picture
that changed the label applied to Nelson Mandela, winner of the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize, from terrorist to statesman.33
Propaganda, however, rejects consideration of a conflict’s more nuanced
political, social, and cultural contexts as working against the clarity it promises. Propaganda values passion over reason. It implies that we already know
everything we need to know to act. To distract from our fundamental lack of
24
Chapter Two
facts, it offers us information’s seductive substitutes: hysteria, indignation,
rage, and fear. These qualities are useful to the media, because they sell papers and make for sensational TV. They’re useful to governments, because
they allow us to be manipulated by carefully selected experts who know how
best to play upon emotions in order to enlist us in approving their policies
and powers. In wartime, passion trumps reason, and misplaced passion drives
us eagerly forward where reason might urge reflection, care, measured speech
and measured action.
Orientalism
The passion cultivated by propaganda in order to generate support for war
emerges from a process that is neither accidental nor innocent. The sheer
consistency of the narratives we tell ourselves about our enemies suggests
this: these stories must be serving something or someone, or else they simply
would not have such currency, such resilience, such extraordinary staying
power. As thoughtful citizens, we are called upon to ask ourselves, as we
should of all the dominant narratives that shape our consciousness and our
lives: just what is it that these stories serve?
One of the most influential answers to this question has emerged from the
work of Edward Said. In his widely studied book Orientalism, he argues that
these narratives emerge from a history of imperial conquest but, more importantly, they also form the cornerstone of that history, supporting, enabling
and justifying it. Said argues that the colonial and imperial projects depend
upon the way we characterize those we see as deeply different from ourselves,
as our opposite and our Other. Over time, these characterizations are systematized, grouped into an organized body of knowledge, a repertory of word
and image so often repeated that it comes to seem like objective knowledge.
Said calls the distorted and distorting lens created by this process Orientalism a framework through which the West examines and understands what it
perceives as the foreign or alien. Said’s work focuses on how the West, especially Europe and North America, has traditionally characterized the East, in
which he includes the Middle and Far East. Through this lens, the East is always the West’s opposite: if the West considers itself rational, progressive,
and civilized, then the East is its inverse, superstitious, backwards, and barbaric. This characterization of the East is sometimes overtly hostile, as in the
stereotype of the Eastern man as a violent primitive; sometimes, it is not hostile but infatuated, as in recurrent images of the Eastern woman as exotically
sexual, sultry, pliable and tempting, or of the East as a sensuous place of mystery and marvels. Whether alluring or threatening, however, the Oriental
Making Enemies 25
Other is inevitably seen as less than the West. It might be appealing or horrific, but it is eternally available to the West as an enemy to be conquered or
a temptress to be ravished.
The West, in taking the Orient as its subject of study, comes to feel it
knows and thus has mastered the East. Said argues that the distorting lens of
Orientalism, the organized body of knowledge that creates our definition of
the East, is ultimately intended to help us understand the “natives” so we
may more easily conquer them. Because the West tells such consistent tales
of the endlessly primitive East, it appears eternal, static, and unlike the developed West, can never really change or evolve. The West can justify its
conquest as benign; within the Orientalist’s metaphoric framework, conquest
is for the good of the conquered, freeing them from their own barbarity. Said
observes that, because of the politics of the Orientalist discourse, it ultimately tells us more about the West than about the East: how does the West
act in gathering and ratifying its “official story” of the East? How does it create such stories, and how does it put them to work? These questions suggest
that Orientalism is not an authentic body of knowledge but is instead “most
valuable as a sign of European-Atlantic power over the Orient.”34
The distorting lens of Orientalism masks a far richer, more complex reality. In sharp contrast to Orientalism’s picture of the East as mystical, irrational and superstitious, a place of religious extremism and fanaticism, Said
observes that in his experience, the East is actually an overwhelmingly secular society. It is the consistency and unanimity of media images which create
the impression that the entire East is solely the birthplace of “villains and fanatics.” It would be naive, says Said, to deny that there are terrorists in the
East, “as there are everywhere.”35 The western media’s exclusionary focus on
a single aspect of Eastern experience when considering the East as enemy,
however, has resulted in a picture of the Arab as essentially and exclusively
fanatical, extremist, and violent. The stereotype has become, with repetition, an archetype.
The East covers an immense territory and encompasses many countries.
These countries, while sharing some things in common, also have unique
cultures, politics, and histories. In the same way that no single story could
ever fully describe or account for all the multiple facets of life in the West,
so the narrow story told by Orientalism cannot hope to capture the richness
and range of the East’s reality. The narrowed focus of Orientalism is both reductive and deceptive; it offers a false sense that this misleading picture has
told the whole truth, and that we therefore can fully know the East, even if
we’ve never traveled there, nor seen it in any guise except those which we
in the West have constructed. Orientalism’s illusion of comprehensiveness
26
Chapter Two
is dangerous enough when it causes us to misunderstand the East in the
name of knowing it. It is even more dangerous when that false knowing occurs in the context of war.
The Fabricated Enemy
Since war demands an enemy, we must imaginatively construct one; propaganda furthers this construction. Orientalism allows us to fabricate an alien
enemy effectively and dangerously. The more shadowy, unclear, or ambiguous the face of the enemy, the more urgently propaganda must fabricate an
enemy that we can believe we know, so that we may in turn conquer it. Gene
Knudson-Hoffman observes that “an enemy is a person whose story we have
not heard.”36 In the face of the silence that exists when we have not heard
that other story, our tendency is to race to fill that silence. Instead of listening to multiple stories, instead of using the investigative tools of our journalistic media and our critical minds to search out these stories, we rush to fill
the silence with a story of our own: not the whole, complex truth but the
story that war, to work, needs us to hear. Our most violent passions and our
most dehumanizing metaphors seem to be directed towards those enemies
that we ourselves most actively help to construct.
One of the defining features of the fabricated enemy, the enemy upon
whom we have hung an artful mask, is that this enemy is both representative
and indistinguishable. It is representative because the figure of this enemy
stands in for the whole. In the study of metaphor this device is called
metonymy. Synecdoche uses a part of something to represent or call up its
entirety: we might talk of factory hands, for example, when by hands we really mean the whole body of the workers, not just their hands. While this is
a straightforward example, the work of metonymy in constructing an enemy
is anything but straightforward and has serious implications. When the terrorist comes to stand for all Arabs, for example, or religious extremists for all
Muslims, then we generalize globally, broadening our target from immediate
actors like the 9/11 suicide bombers to encompass all Middle-Easteners, as we
see in blogs denouncing all Arabs as terrorists in sympathies if not in actions.
Racism conspires in this kind of metonymy, whispering to us that “they’re”
really all alike any way, so it doesn’t really matter if we retaliate specifically
against the actual perpetrators or generally against everybody who happens
to look like them. As Lori A. Peek points out, the process of defining the enemy and defining the Other have a lot in common: “the two are clearly similar processes that sometimes lead to devastating outcomes.”37
Making Enemies 27
Seeing the enemy Other as an indistinguishable mass is an essential strategy in the process of fabricating the enemy, especially since our technologies
now allow us to kill so efficiently and indiscriminately. If a weapon cannot
distinguish between a combatant and a civilian target, in order to live with
our actions, we must train ourselves not to distinguish either: we must become as indiscriminate as our bombs. Wartime images stress this indistinguishability, as evidenced in Frank Capra’s 1945 propaganda film, “Know
Your Enemy—Japan,” which told viewers that all Japanese resembled “photographic reprints off the same negative,” a message visually re-inforced by
repeated scenes of a steel bar hammered in a forge, and by scenes of regimented mass activity that confirmed the impression of a race lacking any individual identity.38
Racism at large works on this same principle, lumping together into a single mass all the variety of individual humanity. Said cites George Orwell’s
travel essay “Marrakesh” as an example of this; Orwell writes that, among the
crowds of Marrakesh, there are so many people that “ it is always difficult to
believe that you are walking among human beings . . . the people have brown
faces—besides, there are so many of them! Are they really the same flesh as
yourself? Do they even have names? Or are they merely a kind of undifferentiated brown stuff, about as individual as bees or coral insects?”39 Unlike the
civilized citizens of the West, who are primarily identified with culture rather
than with nature, the hordes of the East are as natural as insects, and as undifferentiated, simply an inseparable part of the hive or swarm. Orwell’s essay
links the citizens of Marrakesh with the dirt itself: “They rise out of the earth,
they sweat and starve for a few years, and then they sink back into the nameless mounds of the graveyard and nobody notices that they are gone. And
even the graves themselves soon fade back into the soil.”40 To say that these
soiled beings, these people “with brown faces” who emerge from and return
to the earth, die without anyone noticing is an extraordinary statement. Orwell, deeply invested in social critique, no doubt intended his words to evoke
compassion, outrage, and a reforming zeal. As the product of an Orientalist
culture, however, he had only a limited number of metaphors through which
he was able to understand what he saw in the streets of Marrakesh. Conditioned by the dominant Orientalist discourse to think of those from the East
as a seething, disorganized mass, how else could he interpret what he saw?
Shaped by ongoing metaphors of the East as populated not by individuals but
by aggregates, by chaotic masses of humanity, he was unable to imagine that
even the poorest street beggar might possess family who would care about
him, miss him, mourn his death. Instead, the Orientalist vision imagines
28
Chapter Two
that, because the West doesn’t care about the individual Easterner, each must
go into the ground not just unmourned but unnoticed. Orwell’s words find a
disturbing echo in our century in an email sent to peace activist Cindy Sheehan from someone describing himself or herself as a “patriotic American.”
The emailer claimed that Iraqi mothers and fathers captured on film screaming because their babies have been killed “are just acting for the cameras.
They are animals who don’t care about their children because they know
they can produce another.”41
When the seething mass portrayed by Orientalism is not perceived as
threat, it is treated relatively benignly as the focus of our sympathy or our will
to reform. When it becomes a threat, however, the metaphor of the mass becomes murderous, justifying indiscriminate killing. It is within this
metaphorical framework that a columnist like Ben Shapiro can call for the
mass death of all Afghanis; every citizen of the enemy country becomes indistinguishable, justifiable prey. When war is total, as current military strategy informs us it must be, no one is immune from attack. The metaphoric
fabrication of an undifferentiated enemy endorses this approach; if one of
them did it, then all of them must be guilty. Total war depends on constructing an enemy that justifies such widespread hatred and wanton destruction. The fabricated enemy becomes something broader, more pernicious, and more insidious than an opponent in battle; the “entire population
is viewed as a non-human Other.”42 Not only, in this framework, is it impossible to tell one indistinguishable lump of matter from another, it is equally
impossible to distinguish them from the earth itself: they’re all a part of the
same big, brown pile of dirt.
Orientalism constructs its Other based on a series of oppositions or binaries, and when we fabricate an enemy through metaphor, we do the same. If
we are one thing, we say, then they must be the opposite. These binaries are
self-perpetuating, trapping us in an either/or framework. Each half or term of
the binary holds the other term in place: if they are associated with nature,
then we must be associated with nature’s opposite, culture. Since we are associated with culture, they will always be associated with nature. In a binarydriven discourse, it’s hard to imagine a way out of these either/or formulations. Since wartime intensifies our public rhetoric, it is no surprise that the
binaries invoked by our politicians in the war on terror and echoed by the
media reflect that most fundamental of all oppositions, good versus evil.
While our historical enemy might change over time, our metaphorical enemy has never evolved: that eternal Other is always evil to our good, destroyer to our preserver, death to our life. Thus, while the specific adjectives
we apply to our enemies may evolve from generation to generation, from
Making Enemies 29
conflict to conflict, the positive adjectives always belong to our side, and the
negative ones are always assigned to the enemy other.
While the adjectives and images used in fabricating the enemy may alter,
there are overlapping aspects they all share, metaphors of destructive difference that are common to all. The metaphors we use to give an evil face to a
faceless enemy remain, over time, remarkably constant. Ann Burnette and
Wayne Kraemer call this process of directing public fear and hatred onto a
chosen target “putting a face on evil.”43 Historical analysis of the enemy image reveals that perceptions of the enemy tend to mirror each other—that is,
each side attributes the same virtues to itself and the same vices to the enemy. In each case, “we” are trustworthy, peace-loving, honorable and humanitarian; “they” are treacherous, warlike, and cruel. Jerome Frank and Andrei Melville note that in 1942, when Germany and Japan were enemies of
the United States, the first five adjectives used by Americans in opinion surveys to describe the enemies included warlike, treacherous, and cruel. None
of these words appeared among the first five describing the Soviets, who at
that time were American allies. In 1966, when the Soviet Union had become a threat, among the primary adjectives describing the Soviets were warlike and treacherous. These adjectives also were applied to the Chinese, but
had disappeared from the lists applied to the Germans and Japanese, who by
then were allies of the United States.44 When the enemy is fabricated as representing everything that is evil, the nation is usually confirmed in its sense
of its own identity. As David Kennedy observes, “while it may not be true
that Americans needed an enemy image in order to define themselves, when
they were compelled to construct the portrait of an enemy they did in fact
reveal their sense of themselves.”45
The binarized image of the enemy as our eternal opposite is not only dangerous for the stability of international relations but leads to serious consequences for the national domestic life. Frank and Melville note that this happens because
the hysteria about the outer threat is often used as justification for secrecy and
suspicion, covert actions, policies creating “mobilized” societies, artificial national unity, “witch hunts,” and policies suppressing dissent, all ignoring domestic problems and distracting attention from them. By projecting the blame
for these on the enemy, each side protects its own self-esteem from the realization that it has been unable to solve its own problems.46
The construction of enemy images is also, notes Debra Merskin, a “crucial
part of the process of justifying an unjust war,” and is necessary if “power elites
want to move military and diplomatic policies forward without full disclosure
30
Chapter Two
but with maximum public support.”47 Such public support is easier to manipulate when the menace of our enemy-opposite is portrayed as comprehensive
and fundamental. Rayan El Amine notes that the Islamic menace “has replaced the red menace, and the “evil empire” of the cold war has become the
less eloquent, but just as deadly, “evil doers” of the Arab and Muslim world.”48
The intensity of the language and its archaic, almost biblical quality suggest
that the war on terror is being framed as a new crusade, a holy war. George
Bush made this framing explicit in a September 16, 2001, speech warning
Americans that “this crusade, this war on terrorism, is gonna take a while.”49
The word crusade conjures up images of a spiritual war fought in the interests
of Christianity over barbarism, bearing the imprint of a mandate that originates not with governments but with God. The crusades of the eleventh century also employed this strategy, calling soldiers to a war of divine liberation;
looking back, historians now see such rhetoric as cover for a much more pragmatic conquest, a crusade not for saving souls but for a more earthly conquest.
Bush’s use of the word, says Grand Mufti Soheib Bensheikh, dangerously recalls “the barbarous and unjust military operations against the Muslim world”
by Christian knights, who launched repeated attempts to capture Jerusalem
over the course of several hundred years.50 Bruce Lawrence notes that then as
now, “there is no Muslim enemy. In the eleventh century the First Crusades
constructed him to cover spurious conquests and wanton killings. In the
twenty-first century, the New Crusades reconstruct him to cover global asymmetrics and moral blunders. Both sets of crusaders are zealots with feet of
clay.”51 Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells point out that the fear, rage and
ethnic and religious stereotyping seen in contemporary Western culture echo
that found in the Middle Ages during the first Crusades. They suggest that,
since the first crusades, the dominant perception of the relationship between
Islam and the West has been one of a vast, unending, inevitable struggle. Propaganda gives a form to this struggle, presenting it as an unavoidable and unyielding battle between monolithic powers a “clash of civilizations.”52 The
phrase “clash of civilizations,” popularized by Bernard Lewis in “The Roots of
Muslim Rage,” articulates a particular way of understanding conflict in the
post-Cold War world. Lewis’ view is that Muslims exist historically and inevitably in a state of conflict with Judeo-Christian civilization. This view
shapes and limits our understanding of history and conflict. Khaled Abou elFadl, a law professor at UCLA, recalls that Lewis, when asked in an interview
what the West should do about “these problems with Muslims,” said “in effect,
‘Well, there’s nothing we can do. They are just the way they are. They’re just
going to hate us and go after us.’”53 Samuel P. Huntington expanded and popularized this theory in his best-selling 1996 book The Clash of Civilizations and
Making Enemies 31
the Remaking of World Order. Huntington argues that cultural and religious
identities will overtake political allegiances as the main source of conflict in
the post-Cold War world. In a 1993 Foreign Affairs article, he wrote:
It is my hypothesis that the fundamental source of conflict in this new world
will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic. The great divisions
among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The
fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.54
Although the phrase “clash of civilizations” has a compellingly resonant
sound, critics of the hypothesis point out its dangers. Abou el-Fadl notes that
it locks both East and West into a state of irresolvable conflict by asserting
that “Muslims have existed fundamentally and irreparably in a state of conflict with the Judeo-Christian civilization”; this “gives the Islamic threat a
certain historical inevitability: ‘Well, you know it was like that in history and
will remain like that.’”55 Once we are taught to see all Muslim-Western conflicts, no matter how specific or localized, as a titanic “clash of civilizations,”
then whatever these conflicts are really about is disguised, absorbed into a
model that sees West and East as “two titans” always at war over fundamental differences of identity. The identity assigned by the West to Islam is, in
this model, always hostile and alien, which means that there is no way out of
the irreconcilable differences between the two combatants. Only by abandoning our long-standing construction of the Muslim world as intractably inimical can we hope to break free of the brutalizing binaries of the West versus East paradigm, which relies so heavily on the image of the monolithic
Muslim other.56
The news media constantly re-circulate images and language that reinforce
this characterization of the Muslim as fundamentally alien, as do scenes from
countless movies and TV programs featuring Arabs almost solely in the role
of zealots, fanatics or terrorists. News broadcasts repeatedly show scenes emphasizing this zealotry; moderate voices from Islam, and there are many, are
ignored in favor of repeated images of extremity. Newspaper headlines echo
the framing of the struggle in epic, eternal form. “This fanaticism that we in
the West can never understand,” says one such headline. “Praise to Allah—
dancing with joy, the warrior race of fanatics born to detest the West” says another; “In the heart of London, demands for a Holy War” says a third.57
Christopher Allen notes that these are not “the exception to the rule, nor are
they a result of years of studying Islamophobia in the media. Instead these are
32
Chapter Two
just a small sample of many similar examples that have been prolifically emblazoned across front pages and shown across our screens since the atrocities
in America.”58 Merskin notes that we didn’t see “the end of enemy construction with the war in Iraq. The stereotype was carried from the Taliban, bin
Laden, and terrorists to the axis of evil and Hussein. Since the occupation of
Iraq, the evil Arab image shifted to Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and
‘crazed’ Iraqis opposed to U.S. occupation.”59 Such images are not, Merskin
argues, “simply an issue of imbalance and unfair representations,” but speak to
larger, more fundamental questions of why such images are so necessary and
prevalent.”60
It is this founding of enmity in identity, rather than in circumstance, that
causes critics like Said to observe that Muslims are hated not for what they
do, but for who they are. In Covering Islam, Said writes:
Much of what one reads and sees in the media about Islam represents the aggression coming from Islam because that is what ‘Islam’ is. Local and concrete
circumstances are thus obliterated. In other words, covering Islam is a onesided activity that obscures what ‘we’ do and highlights instead what Muslims
and Arabs, by their flawed nature are.61
To protect the simplicity of enmity required to sustain a war, we might not
actually want to know more about our enemies; it is enough that we can
identify them and claim to know them. We want to very clearly mark our enemy as other, and this marking is not always figurative: sometimes we want
literally to mark them, to stamp them clearly with the sign of their alien
identity. Nazi Germany infamously did this with its enemy Others, forcing
Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah Witnesses, and Gypsies to wear yellow stars, and
pink, violet, or brown triangles for easy identification, so that they could be
effectively rounded up, imprisoned and executed under the visible banner of
their Otherness. We might think we are, in a more liberal democracy, far
from that kind of marking, yet a recent American talk-radio show on the AM
station 630WMAL featured listeners enthusiastically endorsing the show’s
suggestion that all Muslims living in the U.S. should be identified with an
armband or crescent-shaped tattoo. Reuters news agency reported on December 2, 2006, that radio host Jerry Klein received many calls in support of
his modest proposal; one caller said, “Not only do you tattoo them in the
middle of their forehead but you ship them out of this country . . . they are
here to kill us.”62 Demonstrating the link between identifying and punishing
the Other, another said that simply marking Islamic American citizens’ documents wasn’t enough. “‘What good is identifying them?’ he asked. ‘You have
Making Enemies 33
to set up encampments like during World War Two with the Japanese and
Germans.’” After an hour-long discussion “rich with arguments on why visual identification of ‘the threat in our midst’ would alleviate the public’s
fears,” Klein revealed his proposition was a hoax, intended to make public
the xenophobia always just below the surface in post 9/11 America. He expressed shock and disbelief that anyone agreed with his mock proposal: “For
me to suggest to tattoo marks on people’s bodies, have them wear armbands,
put a crescent moon or their driver’s license on their passport or birth certificate is disgusting. It’s beyond disgusting. Because basically what you just
did was show me how the German people allowed what happened to the Jews
to happen. . . . We need to separate them, we need to tattoo their arms, we
need to make them wear the yellow Star of David, we need to put them in
concentration camps, we basically just need to kill them all because they are
dangerous.”63 Klein confessed himself surprised by the degree of acceptance
of his tattoo plan: “There were plenty of callers angry with me, but there were
plenty who agreed.”64
As Klein’s hoax shows, fabricating an enemy is a social process with profound consequences. When the enemy is not immediately apparent, we must
provide one in order to generate a rationale and an impetus for war—and, as
Said points out, in order to justify the money and resources diverted to the
military and away from other national needs. As a social process, making an
enemy begins with governments and is crystalized in expertly managed PR
campaigns, furthered by a news media no longer able to perform its necessary
work of objective investigation, and absorbed and continued by a public deprived of the full picture, too harried by propaganda-fed anxieties and restrictive metaphoric frames to do its own key, citizenly job of critical thought.
Notes
1. Friedrich Nietzsche. On the Genealogy of Morals. 1887. Oxford University Press,
Revised edition, 1998: 186.
2. Survey cited in Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. “How to Sell a War.” In
These Times. April 8, 2003. See www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=299_0_1_
0_M (June 26, 2007).
3. Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. “How to Sell a War.”
4. Noam Chomsky. “Propaganda, American-Style.” Z. September 17, 2001. See
www.zpub.com/un/chomsky.html (June 26, 2007).
5. Nancy Snow. Information War: American Propaganda, Free Speech and Opinion
Control since 9-11. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003: 23.
6. Nancy Snow. Information War.
34
Chapter Two
7. James Sandrolini. “Propaganda: The Art of War.” Chicago Media Watch. Fall
2002. See www.chicagomediawatch.org/02_3_artofwar.shtml (June 26, 2007).
8. James Sandrolini. “Propaganda: The Art of War.”
9. Gustave M. Gilbert. Nuremberg Diary. New York: Farrar, Straus and Co., 1947.
10. Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. “How to Sell a War.” In These Times.
April 8, 2003. See www.inthesetimes.com/comments.php?id=299_0_1_0_M (June
26, 2007).
11. Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. “How to Sell a War.”
12. Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. “How to Sell a War.”
13. Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. “How to Sell a War.”
14. Jacques Ellul. Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. New York: Vintage Books, 1973: 64.
15. Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber. “How to Sell a War.”
16. Normon Solomon. “War Needs Good Public Relations.” FAIR. October 25,
2001. See www.fair.org/media-beat/011025.html (June 26, 2007).
17. Trish Schuh. “Racism and Religious Desecration as U.S. Policy: Islamophobia,
a Retrospective.” Double Standards. 6 May 2006. See www.doublestandards.org/schuh1
.html (June 26, 2007).
18. Tom Engelhardt. “Collateral Damage: The “Incident” at Haditha.” TomDispatch
.com June 7, 2006. See www.tomdispatch.com/post/88850/the_real_meaning_of_
haditha (August 1, 2007).
19. Thomas E. Ricks and Ann Scott Tyson. “Troops at Odds with Ethics Standards.” The Washington Post. May 5, 2007. Posted on Truthout. See www.truthout.org/
docs_2006/050507Z .shtml (June 26, 2007).
20. Thomas E. Ricks. “Probe Into Iraq Deaths Finds False Reports.” The Washington Post. June 1, 2006.
21. Tom Engelhardt. “Collateral Damage: The “Incident” at Haditha.”
22. Ben Shapiro. “Civilian Casualties OK By Me.” TownHall. July 25, 2002. See
www.townhall.com/columnists/BenShapiro/2002/07/25/enemy_civilian_casualties_
ok_by_me (June 26, 2007).
23. Ben Shapiro. “Civilian Casualties OK By Me.”
24. Ben Shapiro. “Civilian Casualties OK By Me.”
25. Baldilocks. “Spain’s the Target.” March 11, 2004. See baldilocks.typepad.com/
baldilocks/2004/03/spains_the_targ.html (June 26, 2007).
26. Jim McDermott. “Rhetoric of the War Crusade.” Speech to the U.S. House of
Representatives. May 11, 2004. See www.house.gov/mcdermott/sp040511a.shtml (June
26, 2007).
27. Jim McDermott. “Rhetoric of the War Crusade.”
28. Ahdaf Soueif. “A profound racism infects the U.S. and British establishments.” The Guardian (UK). May 5, 2004. Posted on www.arabworldbooks.com/arab/
ahdaf3.htm (June 26, 2007).
29. Ahdaf Soueif. “A profound racism infects the U.S. and British establishments.”
30. Norman Solomon. “Media Spin Revolves around the Word Terrorist.” Z. October 4, 2001. See www.zmag.org/solorerr.htm (June 26, 2007).
Making Enemies 35
31. Norman Solomon. “Media Spin Revolves around the Word Terrorist.”
32. Norman Solomon. “Media Spin Revolves around the Word Terrorist.”
33. Blair Shewchuk. “ Terrorists and Freedom Fighters.”CBC News Online. October 18, 2001. See www.cbc.ca/news/indepth/words/terrorists.html (June 26, 2007).
34. Edward Said. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979: 6.
35. Edward Said. On Orientalism. 1998. [Videorecording]. Media Education Foundation.
36. Gene Knudsen Hoffman. “Taking it from the personal to the global via Compassionate Listening.” Peace Heroes. January 2002. See www.peaceheroes.com/Peace
Heroes/jeanknudsenhoffman.htm (June 26, 2007).
37. Lori Peek. “Constructing the Enemy during Times of Crisis: America after
9/11.” Divide: Journal of Writing and Ideas. 1(2), 2004: 26–30.
38. John Dower. War without Mercy. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986: 19.
39. Cited in Edward Said. Orientalism.
40. Edward Said. Orientalism.
41. Cindy Sheehan. “A New World Is Possible.” Truthout. January 26, 2006. See
www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi/48/17252 (July 17, 2007).
42. Lori Peek. “Constructing the Enemy during Times of Crisis.”
43. Ann E. Burnette and Wayne L. Kraemer. “Putting a Face on Evil: The Rhetorical Creation of an Enemy in the U.S. War on Terrorism.” Presentation to the National Communication Association Convention 2003.
44. Jerome D. Frank and Andrei Y. Melville. “The Image of the Enemy and the
Process of Change.” In Anatolii Andreevich Gromyko and Martin E. Hellman (Eds).
Breakthrough: Emerging New Thinking, Beyond War Foundation, online edition, 1988.
45. David M. Kennedy. “Culture Wars.” Enemy Images in American History. Edited
by Regnhild Fiebig-von-Hase and Ursula Lehmkuhl. New York: Berghahn, 1997:
355.
46. Jerome D. Frank and Andrei Y. Melville. “The Image of the Enemy and the
Process of Change.”
47. Debra Merskin. “Post-9/11 Discourse.” Bring ‘em On: Media and Politics in the
Iraq War. Lee Artz and Yahya R. Kamalipour (eds). Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2005.
48. Rayan El-Amine. “The Making of the Arab Menace.” Left Turn Magazine.
May 1, 2005. See www.leftturn.org/?q=node/345 (June 26, 2007).
49. Peter Ford. “Europe cringes at Bush ‘crusade’ against terrorists.” The Christian
Science Monitor. September 19, 2001. See www.csmonitor.com/2001/0919/p12s
2-woeu.html (June 26, 2007).
50. Peter Ford. “Europe cringes at Bush ‘crusade’ against terrorists.”
51. Bruce Lawrence. Review of The New Crusades: Constructing the Muslim Enemy.
Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells (Eds). New York: Columbia University Press,
2003. Posted on Columbia University Press website. See www.columbia.edu/cu/cup
/catalog/data/023112/0231126662.HTM (June 26, 2007).
52. Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells (Eds). The New Crusades: Constructing
the Muslim Enemy. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003: 3.
36
Chapter Two
53. Haroon Siddiqui. “Four telltale Themes: Anti-Muslim bigotry ‘spreading like
wildfire’.” Scholar Of The House. November 24, 2002. See www.scholarofthehouse.org
/fourtorstar1.html (June 26, 2007).
54. Edward Said. “The Clash of Ignorance.” The Nation. October 4, 2001. See www
.thenation.com/doc/20011022/said>. (June 26, 2007).
55. Haroon Siddiqui. “Four telltale Themes: Anti-Muslim bigotry ‘spreading like
wildfire’.”
56. Emran Qureshi and Michael A. Sells (Eds). The New Crusades.
57. Christopher Allen. “Islamophobia in the Media since 911.” Forum against Islamophobia and Racism UK (FAIRUK). September 29, 2001. See www.fairuk.org/docs
/Islamophobia-in-the-Media-since-911-ChristopherAllen.pdf (June 26, 2007).
58. Christopher Allen. “Islamophobia in the Media since 911.”
59. Debra Merskin. “Post-9/11 Discourse.”
60. Debra Merskin. “Post-9/11 Discourse.”
61. Edward Said. Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We
See the Rest of the World. Revised Edition, New York: Vintage Books, 1997: xxii.
62. Bernd Debusmann. “Radio Hoax Reveals U.S. Anti-Muslim Sentiment in
U.S., fear and distrust of Muslims runs deep.” Reuters. December 1, 2006.
63. Bernd Debusmann. “Radio Hoax.”
64. Bernd Debusmann. “Radio Hoax.”
C H A P T E R
T H R E E
Rallying Racism:
Dehumanization and Genocide
In the scale of dehumanization, we drop from the midpoint of the subhuman barbarian to the nonhuman, from the savage to the animal. . . .
The lower down in the animal phyla the images descend, the greater
sanction is given to the soldier to become an exterminator of pests.
—Sam Keen1
Dehumanization as a Process
The object of warfare is the death or destruction of the enemy. In total war,
that destruction must be total. But who is this enemy who must be obliterated? Almost all military texts, observes Sam Keen in Faces of the Enemy,
speak of the enemy in strangely oblique terms. We are obsessed with the idea
of the enemy and yet we avoid deep or sustained thought on the subject,
gleaning our ideas from headlines, sound bites, and other forms of truncated
information. We are reluctant to think too deeply about the enemy because
to do so might weaken our simplicity and moral clarity, replacing it with complexity and nuance. To resist this, in times of war we go in the opposite direction, creating images of the enemy that simplify and reduce. We are persuaded that we’re on the right side; metaphors that represent our side as
righteous and the enemy as demonic reinforce this conviction. The most potent images are those that not only portray enemies as straightforwardly villainous, but also go further to deny their basic humanity. These images are
part of verbal and visual metaphoric systems linking the enemy to objects or
37
38
Chapter Three
animals, dirt or germs, things that require domination, cleansing or elimination. This dehumanization allows for acts of violence that would usually be
forbidden to be celebrated. It also allows us, in the face of these acts, to protect our image of ourselves, since by killing the constructed enemy we are being intrinsically virtuous. When our enemy is inhuman, especially when
metaphorically figured as toxic, spreading, insidious, and contaminating, it
becomes a civic, even a moral duty to inhibit its pernicious spread. Eradication of the enemy within this framework becomes a paradoxically humane
task, taking on the very aspects of humanity we have removed from our dehumanized enemy.
Metaphors creating and reinforcing the enemy’s lack of humanity permit us
to confirm our own humanity, allowing acts of war to be imaginatively transposed. As we transform the human enemy into the sub-human, our humanly
motivated wars, driven by tangled complexes of motivation, are themselves
transformed. They become something simpler, clearer, and more monolithic.
They also re-cast us, whether we see ourselves as aggressors or respondents, as
both heroic and necessary. The less human the enemy, the more insidious and
pervasive it appears, the louder the call to extermination. Metaphors of extermination allow us to perform what, in other circumstances, we would see
as grossly inhuman acts, all in the name of a threatened and beleaguered humanity. In doing so, we can reassure ourselves that we are serving not just ourselves but the world: cleansing it; making it safe; ridding it of the noxious, the
poisonous, the verminous, or the infectious. In the process, we preserve our
identities as doers of good; we are performing necessary acts of eradication,
protection, even hygiene. Only by creating a consistent textual body of such
dehumanizing metaphors can we surmount individual and community inhibitions against killing, inhibitions that are long-standing and deep-seated. It is
not easy to kill another human being, so our propaganda ensures that we don’t
see our enemies as human, telling ourselves instead persistent stories about
their animal, diseased, or indistinguishably conglomerate nature.
Keen observes that the categories by which we dehumanize the enemy
have a remarkable coherence. After studying wartime propaganda from many
periods and nations, he observed that the posters and cartoons, whatever
their origins, were in key ways so similar that “it’s as if [the propagandists] all
went to the same art school.”2 Keen categorizes these images into “archetypes” characterized by dominant themes depicting different aspects of their
otherness and alienness. These archetypes act as key mechanisms in progressively reducing the figured and fabricated enemy.
For Keen, most human societies are organized around principles of profound distrust and paranoia and solidified by the tribal mind’s “basic antago-
Rallying Racism 39
nism between insiders and strangers.”3 Race is crucial to this process. The
visible distinctions of racial difference offer a central locus around which this
antagonism gathers. Our hostility to strangers is most reserved for those who
look least like us. We can, with our flexible and resilient metaphoric imaginations, make an enemy of anyone once we perceive ourselves under threat;
our varied campaigns against those of different sexual orientations, economic
classes, even ages demonstrate this. However, race and its potent visibilities
of difference is fundamental to our most virulent processes of enemy construction. Identifying a sub-human enemy based on racial characteristics offers us seductive ways of dealing with the threat. If they are beasts, for example, we have greater opportunities for control: we can “round them up,” “herd
them,” or “ship them out,” maintaining a pure space reserved for the humans
who look like us. Systematic racism is central to the belief that we can isolate or corral these animals, decreasing our risk of future disaster. The racerelated metaphors of purity and pollution work to limit miscegenation within
a society, to keep bloodlines pure and prevent dilution, while anxieties
around issues of national borders work to limit incursion from without. The
“hostile imagination,” its hostility fed by paranoid anxieties about an encroaching other, creates a repertoire of images of the enemy.4 These images
reflect and consolidate our sense of the enemy’s fundamental difference from
us. Keen broadly identifies several common categories by which this difference is conferred: the enemy is portrayed as the eternally alien stranger, as
aggressor, faceless, barbarian, greedy, criminal, torturer, rapist, death, enemy
of God, and animal or germ. This final metaphor is distinctive in that, unlike the other categories, it explicitly treats the enemy as sub-human. The
stranger, barbarian, rapist, and so on, are profoundly troubling images, tapping into some of our most primal fears, but they still grant a human status
to the enemy; the rapist is still a human agent, and as such can be dealt with
within the sphere of human agency, such as a criminal trial. Even rapists, we
acknowledge, possess some basic human rights, and criminal guilt does not
entirely abrogate those rights. For those seen as outside the realm of humanity, however, and therefore outside the scope of ideas like law and justice,
these rights are irrelevant: “the concepts of deserving basic needs and fair
treatment,” says Susan Opotow, simply “do not apply.”5
The categories identified by Keen powerfully and primally stigmatize the enemy. The expressions of the hostile imagination are often ingenious and compelling, which is part of their power and their effectiveness. Beyond simple
stigma, however, lies dehumanization. Like other forms of propaganda, dehumanization repeatedly portrays the enemy as less than us; it goes further, however, in the extent to which it strips away humanity through the consistency
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of its metaphoric links with the bestial, the verminous, and the microscopic.
Tropes of animal, insect, germ and disease are so important to our construction
of the enemy in the war on terror, so linked to larger discourses of racism, that
they require concentrated attention.
Dehumanization creates an enemy that not only allows for but demands
cruel treatment; such cruelty is seen as requisite to the larger task of extermination. Dehumanization allows us to re-cast cruelty and violence as something else; after all, if an enemy is so far down the evolutionary ladder that it
cannot feel pain, then how can inflicting pain be cruel? One of the most
striking historical examples of this comes from WWII: the Japanese military
performed medical experiments on human prisoners who they called
“maruta”—literally, “logs of wood.”6 Once made not only inhuman but inanimate, the bodies of feeling beings could be brutalized without compunction
or regret.
Dehumanization also allows us to blame the victims by eliminating their
basic human attributes and thus their claims to protection. Hanan Ashrawi
argues that “Blaming the victim has been the common resort of the guilty in
rationalizing and distorting the horror of the crime.”7 Within this
metaphoric framework, the fault lies in the nature of the sub-human enemy,
and those faults are perceived as so hideous and dangerous that obliterating
them is both necessary and noble: like the cancerous cell, if simply left alone,
the encroaching enemy will spread and replicate. Obliteration is therefore
the only safe, rational, even the only moral response.
A History of Dehumanizing Practices
One of the most important reasons for developing a critique of how
metaphors dehumanize the enemy is the gravity of dehumanization’s consequences. One of its most devastating roles is in mass killings and genocide.
Gregory H. Stanton has influentially argued that dehumanization is a necessary precursor to genocide, a prerequisite for genocide’s comprehensive violence. The first three stages leading to genocide, Stanton argues, are classification, symbolization, and dehumanization. Our metaphors of the enemy
accomplish in one gesture all three of these steps, powerfully conflating them
into a single process that simultaneously identifies, marks, symbolizes and
profoundly devalues the Other.
For Stanton, genocide is not a product but a process. It may appear sudden
but is actually linked to a series of separate stages, each progressive and each
integral to the “genocidal process.” Classification, symbolization, and dehumanization are followed by organization, polarization, identification, extermination, and finally denial of the genocidal act. Stanton argues that
Rallying Racism 41
every genocide is followed by denial. The mass graves are dug up and hidden.
The historical records are burned, or closed to historians. Even during the
genocide, those committing the crimes dismiss reports as propaganda. Afterwards such deniers are called “revisionists.” Others deny through more subtle
means: by characterizing the reports as “unconfirmed” or “alleged” because
they do not come from officially approved sources; by minimizing the number
killed; by quarreling about whether the killing fits the legal definition of genocide (“definitionalism”); by claiming that the deaths of the perpetrating group
exceeded that of the victim group, or that the deaths were the result of civil
war, not genocide.8
Before there can be an act of genocide to deny, however, there must be a
number of conditions in place to allow genocidal violence to occur. Stanton
argues that classification, the first condition or stage, is fundamental and
deeply encoded in human language. All languages require classification, a
“division of the natural and social world into categories.”9 All cultures have
categories to distinguish between “us” and “them,” between members of our
group and others. While all language may make this distinction, it is when
we add symbolization to “name and signify” our classifications that what
Keen calls the “paranoid culture” begins to assert itself, making certain physical characteristics (such as skin color or facial features) symbols for racial or
ethnic classifications.10 In the later stage of the genocidal process, these
markers may become abstract and externalized, as with the yellow star forced
on the Jews of Nazi Germany or the blue-checked scarf used by the Khmer
Rouge in Cambodia to identify, marginalize, and deport people from the
Eastern Zone.
Classification and symbolization are widespread human practices that are
part of our national identity and cultural self-awareness. When joined by dehumanization, these qualities move a society significantly further down the
grim road to genocide. Dehumanization relegates the classified group to a
category of sub-humanity, making it easier to overcome an aversion to
killing. Instead, killing becomes something to be celebrated; thus, in a notorious tape recording of an interview with members of the elite Canadian Airborne Unit in Somalia, a soldier is heard telling the interviewer that their
“peacekeeping” mission “sucks, man. We ain’t killed enough n____ yet.”11
In the later stages of the genocidal process, polarization intensifies difference, as moderates are silenced or killed. Often, the first casualties of genocide are moderates within the killing groups, voices raised in objection over
the escalating violence. Extremists target moderates so that only the extremes will be left in conflict, with no milder middle to slow the cycle of descent into genocide. Once moderate voices have been suppressed, individual
deaths escalate into mass killings, in which the rhetoric of extermination is
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invoked. Genocide is always organized, says Stanton, usually by the state and
through the deployment of the army or militias. This can set off retaliatory
or revenge killings, creating a “downward whirlpool-like cycle of bilateral
genocide.”12
Dehumanization and Slavery
Where dehumanization does not lead to genocide, it often leads to enslavement. Here again, people are seen as animals: just as Aristotle called the ox
the “poor man’s slave,” the inversion of that equation links the dehumanized
Other to the laboring animal. In fact, it’s often theorized that the domestication of animals that began during the Neolithic Revolution provided the
model and inspiration for human slavery. Collars, chains, prods, whips, and
branding irons were employed to domesticate and control animals just as
similar tactics were used on slaves to ensure they remained docile, subservient and unable to escape. In ancient Mesopotamia, slaves were not only
branded as if they were domestic animals, but were priced according to their
equivalent in cows, horses, pigs, and chickens. This laid the groundwork for
later European and American racial theories that called for the conquest and
exploitation of the “lower races,” who continued to be regarded as animals
and treated accordingly.13
The first African slaves shipped to Lisbon in the mid-1400s were marketed and priced like livestock. Black Africans were portrayed as more akin
to animals than humans because of their “beastlike sexuality and brutish nature.”14 During the 1600s and 1700s, the rising growth of the slave trade reinforced this image of Africans; they were rounded up and given work similar to that of laboring animals. Entirely commodified, slaves were chattel that
could be “bought, sold, traded, leased, mortgaged, bequeathed, presented as a
gift, pledged for a debt, included in a dowry, or seized in bankruptcy.”15
By the 1800s, European scientists had developed theories promoting the
superiority of the white race. In their hierarchical structure, their inferiors
were, in descending order, non-Europeans, women, and Jews. Africans remained at the bottom of this ladder. Like the Japanese scientists who experimented on people they called “logs of wood,” American scientists proclaimed that African slaves could endure without undue suffering levels of
brutality no human could sustain. Some medical doctors argued that the bodies of black Africans possessed fewer pain receptors and therefore could be
flogged without feeling it as a white body would.16 Scientific and medical discourses were both regularly called upon to justify brutality to African and
African-American slaves. In one widely distributed 1905 broadsheet, a caption declares confidently “Scientists Say Negro Still in Ape Stage,” followed
Rallying Racism 43
by the assertion “Races Positively Not Equal”17 (see figure 3.1). In a quasiscientific illustration clearly designed to look like it was taken from a medical textbook, hand-drawn figures of “The Ape” and “The Negro” are juxtaposed in identical postures and are nearly indistinguishable. To reinforce the
clear visual message that “the Negro” is really just an ape masquerading as a
man, elaborate anatomical labelling delineates, limb by limb, the identical
features of the two figures; both have “big hands,” “weak lower limbs,” a
“small brain,” an “animal smell,” the “ape groove” in the skull, and a “black
ape color.” As late as the 1970s, this pamphlet was still being distributed as
part of white supremacist literature, confirming the resilience and endurance
of the animal metaphor as a key mechanism in supporting systematic oppression.
Figure 3.1.
“Scientists Say Negro Still in Ape Stage.” Klu Klux Klan, 1905.
Dehumanization and Native Peoples
The European explorers and colonists who came to America regarded the
native people they encountered there as “dark, sinful, inhuman, and dangerously close to animals.”18 Members of Christopher Columbus’ voyage were
contemptuous of those they encountered, calling them “beasts” because they
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slept on mats instead of beds. Just as herds of wild buffalo came to be recklessly decimated so, too, were native people; as non-human, neither group
was valued, protected, nor, in their destruction, mourned. Settlers, descendants of the first wave of Europeans, largely saw them as a hindrance to furthering colonization and spent the next three hundred years fighting them.
As in the progressive stages of annihilation outlined by Stanton, dehumanization preceded destruction. Indians were vilified in order to justify
their extinction. As David Stannard writes in American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World, Indians were considered “nothing more than a halffilled outline of humanity whose extermination was a logical and necessary
final solution to the problem.” European settlers described “Indians as ‘ugly,
filthy, and inhuman beasts,’ [and] newspapers commonly characterized them
as swine, snakes, pigs and baboons.”19
From formal public discourse to informal mythical folklore, these characterizations persisted. The legendary Davy Crockett, iconically portrayed in
popular culture as the man in the coonskin cap, was in the nineteenth century best known as a noted frontiersman, politician, and martyr. Crockett was
one of the most famous people in America when he was killed at the Alamo
in 1836. His fame was exploited in the Davy Crockett Almanacs, a series of
inexpensive books published after his death but filled with advice, anecdotes
and aphorisms attributed to Crockett. Valued as examples of early American
folklore, they have also been called “a pornography of racism and violence.”20 In the Crockett Almanacs, Indians are called “red niggers,” “a pesky
set of heathens,” “red skin varmints,” “pesky cowards,” and “injun savages.”
The comic anecdote called “Crockett Boiling a Dead Indian For His Sick
Bear” demonstrates the use of the “injun” as a vehicle for humor, excluding
any possible consideration for the Indian as human. It contains comments
that were, at the time, considered quite acceptable: “So I went out an shot
an injun, an sauced him up with tender varmits, sitch as toads, lizards, a crocodile’s tail, and other spurious vegetables, that was calculated to set well on
a delicate stumack and I biled ‘em together, with directions to give the patient half a peck every two hours.”21 The narrator concludes complacently
that “the bare got well directly.”22
Animal metaphors placed Indians beyond the reach of moral obligation or
legal protection. In 1823, U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall
wrote that “The tribes of Indians inhabiting this country were fierce savages,
whose occupation was war, and whose subsistence was drawn chiefly from the
forest.”23 In such circumstances, he said, the law need not be applicable; no
prosecution was needed for killings which could not, since the victim was inhuman, be considered murder. According to Richard Drinnon, “In times of
Rallying Racism 45
trouble, natives were always wild animals that had to be rooted out of their
dens, swamps, jungles.”24 Until the conquest of the natives was complete, the
message was always the same and almost always voiced through metaphors of
natural animality. The most fitting end for “the animals vulgarly called Indians,” as Hugh Brackenridge, an eighteenth century jurist and novelist wrote,
was extermination.25 Within this animal metaphor, the “injuns’” inability to
be civilized confirmed the idea of their bestiality, which could thus be seen
as fundamental, pernicious, and stubbornly resistant to improvement. In this
way, they were blamed for their extermination: by being beyond the reach of
the civilizing impulse, they brought their end upon themselves.
Because of their resistance to absorption, acculturation, and conformity to
European models of civilization, natives were constructed as wild, a threat to
culture, and an obstacle to western progress. Their removal therefore was not
only necessary, it was also inevitable, natural and morally desirable. The efficacy of the American Indian genocide garnered some international notice;
according to his biographer John Toland, Adolf Hitler was impressed with its
scope. Toland writes that the Nazi leader “Often praised to his inner circle the
efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—
of red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”26
Propaganda and Japanese Foes in WWII
During World War II, animal and insect epithets were used by the military,
media, and the American public to describe the Japanese. They were labelled
“reptiles,” “insects,” “rats,” “cockroaches,” “vermin,” and “baboons,” setting
the stage for the war that followed and justifying any tactics necessary for victory by the western allies. Historian John Dower describes in War without
Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, the “attachment of stupid, bestial,
even pestilential subhuman caricatures on the enemy, and the manner in
which this blocked seeing the foe as rational or even human facilitated mass
killing. It is, at least for most people, easier to kill animals than fellow humans.”27 Dower notes that bestial metaphors do not emerge solely in
wartime: they are widely present already in the culture but intensify in times
of conquest or contest. The images from which these metaphors are drawn
have been in place since moments of first encounter and are not the exception but the rule, “part of a rich symbolic world” developed and relied upon
by white Europeans and Americans “over the ensuing centuries to put others
in their place.”28 Dower notes that as early as the sixteenth century, traveling Spaniards were characterizing the Japanese as “wild beasts and animals.”
One Spaniard wrote to his European audience that “In wisdom, skill, virtue
and humanity, these people are as inferior to the Spaniards as children are to
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adults . . . there is as great a difference between them as between savagery and
forbearance, between violence and moderation . . . [as] between monkeys and
men.”29
This image of the Japanese as monkey was remarkably persistent, showing
up repeatedly in political cartoons, along with the other dominant images of
rats and bats; all three animals prominently featured pinched faces, squinty
eyes, and protruding teeth. An American poster with the banner “Jap Trap”
shows a rat wearing round spectacles and a Japanese soldier’s cap caught in a
mousetrap, its slanted eyes shut in pain, its giant buck teeth clamped to the
wood of the trap. A U.S. Navy poster depicts Alaska as “Death-Trap for the
Japs”: a mousetrap with springs labelled “Army,” “Navy” and “Civilian” is
shown ready to snap shut on a buck-toothed, bewhiskered rat wearing a cap
marked with the insignia of Japan. Another poster warning “Don’t Talk. Rats
Have Big Ears” shows a rabid-looking rat standing astride Japan, wearing a soldier’s cap and spectacles. The rat is clenching pointed teeth and wiping blood
from a huge, samurai-style sword, while its grotesquely outsized ears, larger
than the country the rat straddles, are pricked to catch careless whispers. The
cover of the popular Colliers magazine from December 12, 1942, shows another familiar image, the Japanese enemy as an epauletted vampire bat aloft
over Pearl Harbor, with devilish-looking slitted eyes, metallic-looking hooks
at each wing tip, and giant fangs (see figure 3.2 ).30 This representation is particularly interesting in that the bat clutches both a very traditional-looking,
decorative sword and a very modern-looking bomb in its prehensile, elongated, monkey-like fingers. A primitive with tools, an animal with access to
modern weaponry is clearly seen as a particularly horrific image.
Anthony V. Navarro notes how frequently these images recur: the U.S.
“fixated,” he notes, “on the dehumanized depiction of the Japanese, presenting them as monkeys and gorillas.”31 European foes, in contrast, were not animalized in the same way, largely because most Americans were of European
descent, so “to dehumanize the Europeans would be to dehumanize themselves.”32 This difference is reflected in a comment made by a Marine to war
correspondent John Hersey in 1942: “I wish we were fighting against Germans. They are human beings, like us—But the Japanese are like animals.”33
With the Japanese enemy, the majority of Americans felt no such genetic or
ethnic ties, so an ethnic hatred for the alien Other could easily be incited as
the Japanese government did to its American enemy: “Both countries realized the importance of eliciting an ethnic hatred for the enemy as well as creating a subhuman image of them. It is much easier to kill a big hairy white
mongrel or vine-swinging, gun-wielding monkey than it is to kill another human being.”34
Figure 3.2.
Cover of Colliers Magazine, December 12, 1942.
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These images were regularly reinforced in popular culture. John Wayne’s
1944 film The Fighting Seabees offers just one example: in the film’s climatic
final combat, American soldiers come upon a valley in which Japanese soldiers are hiding. The Americans flood the valley with oil and then set it
alight. As they run from the flames, the Japanese are machine-gunned down,
even though they offer no resistance. The film reinforces the comment made
by one of Wayne’s fellow soldiers: “we’re not fighting men now, we’re fighting animals.”35 As Celia Roy observes, when Wayne declares in the movie
that he can’t “wait to ‘begin killing the bug-eyed monkeys of Tojo,’ he is not
just hurling a racist epithet, he is voicing the belief system of an entire nation.”36
These images did their work effectively, removing a sense of Japanese humanity so that it became possible to coldly calculate which Japanese cities
would be most advantageous to bomb: should it be the city with the most intellectuals (Kyoto) or the city surrounded by hills which would make the
bomb have the greatest effect (Hiroshima)? An estimated 214,000 Japanese
civilians were killed immediately or died within months after the U.S.
dropped atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima. The loss of lives was justified as necessary to bring a swift end to the war, saving lives on both sides.
“Among the many things that warfare does,” writes Stannard, “is temporarily define the entire enemy population as superfluous, as expendable—a redefinition that must take place before most non-psychopaths can massacre
innocent people and remain shielded from self-condemnation.”37
The extent of this redefinition in the Pacific war is made clear in comments
by American journalist Ernie Pyle; in one of his first reports from the Pacific,
Pyle wrote that “In Europe we felt that our enemies, horrible and deadly as they
were, were still people. But out here I soon gathered that the Japanese were
looked upon as something subhuman and repulsive; the way some people feel
about cockroaches or mice.”38 Images of insects, pests, and vermin surface repeatedly in public discourse about war and the enemy. Among “subhuman”
and “repulsive” beings, vermin clearly rank high (or low) in the collective conscious. It is not surprising, then, that the rat is a popular animal metaphor for
characterizing enemies. A poster frequently found in American West Coast
restaurants during World War II proclaimed, “This restaurant poisons rats and
Japs.”39 The Nation ran a story in 1945 describing a Japanese soldier’s death on
Iwo Jima as “a rat’s death, defiant in a corner until all else fails.”40
Dehumanization and Vietnam
The Nation’s description of the Japanese soldier’s death as “a rat’s death” finds
a disturbing echo decades later in Lt. William Calley’s language as he de-
Rallying Racism 49
fended the massacre by American soldiers of as many as five hundred unarmed Vietnamese civilians, including old men, women, children, and infants in My Lai and neighboring villages. In the initial psychiatric report following the massacre, Calley’s army psychiatrist noted that he did not believe
he was killing fellow humans, but “rather that they were animals with whom
one could not think or reason.”41 As Norman Nakamura wrote in “The Nature of GI Racism during the Vietnam War,” for many soldiers in Vietnam
“there are no Vietnamese people. To them the land is not populated by
people but by “Gooks,” considered inferior, unhuman animals by the racisteducated G.I.”42 One Vietnam War veteran observed that in basic training,
“The only thing they told us about the Viet Cong was they were gooks. They
were to be killed. Nobody sits around and gives you their historical and cultural background. They’re the enemy. Kill, kill, kill. That’s what we got in
practice. Kill, kill, kill.”43 Joe Allen argues that My Lai, although the most
publicized example of this mentality, was not remotely its sole example. My
Lai “was not an aberration,” writes Allen; “smaller, unreported My Lais happened throughout the war.”44 This claim is reinforced in the testimony of
James Duffy, testifying at the “Winter Soldier” investigation in 1971. Duffy
reports “opening fire on what he thought was a group of peasants,” a group
that turned out to be a work party hired by the U.S. government: “I just saw
gooks and I wanted to kill them . . . [there was] the unwritten code that you
can do anything you want to as long as you don’t get caught. That’s, I guess
that’s what happened with the My Lai incident. Those guys just were following the same pattern that we’ve been doing there for ten years, but they
had the misfortune of getting caught at it.”45
In Duffy’s words we can see the brutal consequences of a sustained pattern
of dehumanizing imagery; war’s metaphors perform dangerous acts of translation and mutation, discursive and imaginative acts that precede the physical
act of massacre. Keen argues that animal images of the enemy survive from
conflict to conflict, noting that in WWII, as Glenn Gray recounts, veteran
soldiers spoke of “flushing” a Japanese soldier from his hiding place as if they
were hunters; in telling the story of such a hunt, one veteran “emphasized the
similarity of the enemy soldier to an animal.” None of the American soldiers,
who found the enemy soldier’s attempt to escape “uproariously funny,” apparently “ever considered that he may have had human feelings of fear and
the wish to be spared.”46 In Vietnam, the dominant metaphor of the hunt
continued. One soldier recalled that
We had this one dude who would go out shooting people, then yell “Snake.”
Like, don’t worry, I just killed a snake next to the trail. We come across this old
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papa-san dying in the dirt in a hooch. Mama-san is there leaning over him.
The dude walks up, pulls out that .45, and blows the fucker’s brains out. Says
to me, “I was just helping the fucker out.” Then he turns around and shoots
this mother and her baby. Steps outside the hooch and says, “Snake.”47
Once a population is successfully translated into the non-human through the
operations of metaphor, then anyone, including children, necessarily become
merely prey, always “fair game.” Keen suggests that successfully dehumanizing an enemy is effective because it allows soldiers to kill without guilt, but
is also double-edged. It
allows the warrior-become-exterminator little sense of dignity or pride in his
skill in battle. There is little emotional purgation gained from the slaughter of
such an enemy—no heroic sparring with a worthy opponent, no cosmic drama
of a battle against enemies of God, no wrestling with barbarian giants. Only an
escalating brutality and insensitivity to suffering and death.48
However, the glee exhibited by many soldiers in recounting their kills, and
the collection of grisly mementos of these kills suggests that we might reconsider this claim in light of a different kind of “dignity and pride.” The tropes
of the epic warrior or the knightly warrior may be made irrelevant by the use
of animal metaphors, but they are replaced by the equally potent trope of the
soldier-as-hunter. The hunter-soldier experiences risk equal to that of the
knightly warrior riding against a human foe, so the level of perceived glory can
be just as high; in fact, because the enemy is viewed as treacherous, pestilential, and insidious, the hunter-soldier might be seen as at even greater risk: he
is always vulnerable to the low attacks of the snake in the grass. In the name
of extermination he performs a task that is absolutely necessary, and his collection of symbolic trophies attests to this necessity and to his success at the
task. The narrative of the great hunt and the mighty hunter simply replaces
one variety of paradigmatic pride with another, equally potent kind.
Dehumanization and the Nazi Representation of Jews
When the persecution of the Jews began in Nazi Germany in the 1930s, Jews
were consistently characterized in terms of disease or parasites; Hitler talked
repeatedly of the “Jewish bacilli.’’ This metaphoric language was essential to
the Nazi project of extermination.49 As Richard Grunberger points out, “the
incessant official demonization of the Jew gradually modified the consciousness even of naturally humane people” so that the populace became indifferent to Jewish suffering, “not because it occurred in wartime and under conditions of secrecy, but because Jews were astronomically remote and not real
Rallying Racism 51
people.”50 Siegfried Bork’s research shows that Nazi publications consistently
described Jews as infection, poison, parasites, tumours, bacilli, vermin,
leeches, bacteria, maggots, and malignant ulcers.51 Intensifying their deliberate linking of Jews with the micro-organic and the verminous, Nazis created
propaganda films that interspersed scenes of Jewish immigration with shots
of teeming rats.
The most famous of these films is Der Ewige Jude (The Eternal Jew), produced under the supervision of Joseph Geobbels. It depicts Jews as “corrupt,
filthy, lazy, ugly, and perverse: they are an alien people which have taken
over our world through their control of banking and commerce, yet which
still live like animals.”52 The film’s visuals explicitly link the Jews of Poland
to vermin and insects: an early scene follows a crowd shot of Jews packed
tightly in the streets of a Polish ghetto with swarms of flies on a wall. The
voice-over narration says that “Jewish houses are dirty and neglected,” but
the visual correlation is much stronger and more immediate: it clearly suggests that Jews do not just attract flies but are flies.53 The film’s conflation of
Jews with rats is even more overt and transparent. A shot of a world map
marking the spreading global immigration of Jews “like an irresistible tide,”
as the narrator says, is followed by a shot of seething rats. “Whenever rats appear,” continues the narration, “they bring ruin, by destroying mankind’s
goods and foodstuffs. They are cunning, cowardly, and cruel, and are found
mostly in large packs. Among the animals, they represent the rudiment of an
insidious and underground destruction—just like the Jews among human beings.”54
Less well-known than Der Ewige Jude are a series of picture-books for children that carry the film’s message to a young audience. Ernst Hiemer published storybooks such as Don’t Trust a Fox in a Green Meadow Or the Oath of
a Jew. Heimer’s books, says Mary Mills, capitalized on children’s interest in
the natural world to schematize Germans as good animals and Jews as bad animals: Hiemer constructs stories centered on what are generally considered to
be despicable traits in certain animals and insects and concludes each story
by transferring the undesirable characteristics to the human world via the
Jews. For example, Mills observes that Jews are likened to insect drones because they do not work but live from the labor of others:
Like the cuckoo, Jews are depicted as stealing other people’s homes. They are the
foreigners who threaten to displace the Germans from Germany. As hyaenas
strike disabled animals, Jews are portrayed as preying upon disadvantaged Germans/Christians. Other animals included in these comparisons are the
chameleon (the great deceiver), the locust (the scourge of God), the bedbug (the
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blood sucker), the sparrow (good-for-nothings), the poodle-mops-dachshundpincher (an inferior race created by cross-breeding various types of races), the
poisonous snake (the viper of humanity), and the tapeworm (the parasite of humanity).55
In German folklore Jews were compared to mongrel dogs, insects and parasites in statements such as “in the case of Jews and lice, only a radical cure
helps.”56 By constantly describing Jews as disease-bearing vermin, germs, or
pigs, the Nazis were able to convince the German public that it was necessary to destroy them.57 This is explicit in a Danish cartoon poster, likely produced by the Danish Nazi Party, showing the head of a Jewish man atop the
hunched body of a rat. The rat, drawn in painstaking detail down to the individual scales and bristles on its long tail, sits in the dark behind a wall,
peering out avariciously into the light through a jagged hole. The message of
threat and invasion could not be more clear: they’re in there, crouched in the
dark behind our walls, ready to leap out and get us. The oversized banner
reads “ROTTEN,” which means rat, and in smaller letters “udryd den,” urging viewers to wipe out or exterminate it (see figure 3.3).58
In his examination of the role of metaphor in racial prejudice, Musolff argues
that the Nazis’ anti-Semitic metaphor system is a powerful demonstration of
how stigmatization and dehumanization lead to genocide, a warning about “the
horrific cost of misunderstanding metaphor as mere rhetoric.” He argues that
the source imagery of Hitler’s world-view consisted in the conceptualization of
the German nation as a human body that had to be shielded from disease (or, in
case of an outbreak, cured). Jewish people, who were conceptually condensed
into the super-category of “the Jew” and viewed as an illness-spreading parasite,
represented the danger of disease. Deliverance from this threat to the nation’s
life would come from Hitler and his party as the only competent healers who
were willing to fight the illness.59
The persistent military metaphor of cleansing brings together this trope of the
nation as a body that must be purified of the infection with the trope of the enemy as a parasite that must be eliminated in the name of safety, purity, and hygiene. Since cleanliness is one of the binary opposites to both metaphors of infestation and metaphors of infection, the two notions of pestilence as
germ/disease and as rodent/plague are inextricably conflated. In the paranoid
discourse of propaganda, bodily infection by disease, cultural invasion by the
encroaching enemy, and national infestation by the corrupting enemy become
one and the same thing, a single, resonant, three-sided trope that demands the
totalizing cure of elimination, eradication, and hygienic cleansing.
Figure 3.3.
Danish Nazi Party Propaganda, W.W.II.
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Dehumanization and Rwandan Genocide
The trope of cleansing and purification also supported the genocidal process
as it unfolded in Rwanda. The massacre of 800,000 Rwandans in April 1994
provides evidence of international and institutionalized racism and the effectiveness of hate propaganda. The international community ignored ample, even frantic, warnings about the impending genocide, failing to intervene as nearly one million Rwandans were massacred in a month-long frenzy.
The Rwandans who organized and executed the genocide, says Human
Rights Watch, must bear full responsibility for what happened. However, it
goes on to say, “genocide anywhere implicates everyone; to the extent that
governments and people elsewhere failed to prevent and halt this killing
campaign, they all share in the shame of the crime.”60
Genocide is neither spontaneous nor random; however complex the historical and cultural conditions from which it emerges, it is always at root
linked to perceptions of hostile difference. International response (or lack of
it) to genocide is often deeply implicated in elaborate structures of racism.
Because of Orientalism’s lens, telling us there is something fundamentally
alien, interchangeable and indistinguishable about certain races, we become
almost complacent in the face of mass killings of black- or brown-skinned
people; after all, within the imperial or colonial mentality, as Orwell’s essay
highlights, “there are so many of them!”61 Racist metaphors of non-human
mass, non-human volume, non-human indistinguishability underlie the
comments made by American broadcaster Michael Savage on his nationally
syndicated radio show, during which he told his audience that “intelligent
people, wealthy people . . . are very depressed by the weakness that America
is showing to these psychotics in the Muslim world. They say, ‘Oh, there’s a
billion of them.’” Savage continued: “I said, ‘So, kill 100 million of them,
then there’d be 900 million of them.”62 Since Americans historically prize individuality and individualism, to emphasize the presumed collective nature
of the enemy-Other, framing them repeatedly as interchangeable members of
a dark multitude is intrinsically to devalue it. Being both dark and “billions,”
as the “psychotic” Muslims are in Savages’s extended logic is enough to invite and justify the impulse to thin the herd. “So, kill a million of them” can
only be a defensible statement within a racist metaphorical frame that sees
population density as de facto evidence of inhumanity. The lack of international intervention in the Rwandan massacre, while not as actively murderous in tone as Savage’s comments, like them arose from and was permitted by
the operation of the metaphor of indistinguishable mass.
Over a period of three years the groundwork was laid by ruling party officials to turn Hutus against Tutsis for the purpose of political gain. In March
Rallying Racism 55
1993, a rabidly anti-Tutsi article in the Hutu extremist newspaper Kangura
presented readers with examples of evil committed by the Tutsi. “We are not
wrong in saying that a cockroach gives birth to another cockroach,” the article says. “The Tutsis represent an evil that will reproduce itself for as long
as Tutsis exist. Future generations of Tutsis will not be any better than their
predecessors because a cockroach cannot give birth to a butterfly.”63 The
word “inyernzi” or cockroach was explicitly applied to the Tutsi population;
in the months before the outbreak of genocidal violence in April, hate propaganda and inaccurate news reports were broadcast over Radio Television Libre des Milles Collines, depicting Tutsis as snakes, animals, and most insistently, cockroaches. Government leaders urged the massacre to continue by
using euphemisms for killing, telling citizens to “clear the bush,” “get to
work,” or “clean around their houses.” Listeners readily understood these as
encouragements to slaughter their Tutsi neighbours.64 The hate propaganda
within the country fomented hostility towards Tutsis and the resulting murders led to retaliatory killings of Hutus, a genocidal spiral resulting in the
death of nearly a million people, grim evidence for the effectiveness of racebased metaphor in fueling violence.
Dehumanization in the Persian Gulf War
The first Gulf War in 1991 was launched by Coalition forces to force Iraq to
withdraw its troops after invading Kuwait in August 1990. Douglas Kellner
claims that “The U.S. public have widely viewed Iraqis and Arabs as less
than human since the Gulf War.”65 In the Gulf War, the U.S. forces’ overwhelming technological superiority won a quick, decisive victory, resulting
in civilian deaths now estimated at over 100,000. Following the war, some in
the media quietly acknowledged they had been under pressure “to produce
sanitized coverage which almost entirely ignored the war’s human cost.”66 In
the final forty-eight hours of the Persian Gulf War, defeated Iraq called for a
cease-fire and announced its forces were retreating from Kuwait. Thousands
of soldiers, foreign workers and civilians headed home on the highway towards Basra in Southern Iraq. This escape route became known as the “Highway of Death” when, on February 26, American pilots bombed both ends of
the highway, then systematically strafed and firebombed the stranded
columns for hours without resistance. American Pfc. Charles Sheehan-Miles
said, “It was like going down an American highway—people were all mixed
up in cars, in trucks. People got out of their cars and ran away. We shot them.
. . . The Iraqis were getting massacred.”67 In a Washington Post interview, one
pilot complained that the Air Force was unable to reload cluster bombs fast
enough to kill all the retreating “targets.”68 Estimates suggest that more than
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2,000 vehicles were destroyed and tens of thousands of people killed on the
highway.69 On some planes, as bombs were dropping, the PA system blasted
Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” famous to Americans as the Lone Ranger
theme.
Racist metaphor again accomplished its dehumanizing task: the word
“cockroach” appeared as a label for Iraqis while pilots in attack planes
likened the campaign to “shooting fish in a barrel.” Veterans of Desert Storm
described the massacre on the road to Basra as “the turkey shoot.” American
soldiers described the attack in hunting terms such as “clubbing seals.” Pilots
flying over groups of Iraqi troops reported that the Iraqis “ran like ants” when
the bombs were dropped, commenting “It’s like someone turned on the
kitchen light late at night, and the cockroaches started scurrying.”70 Reports
indicated that many of those retreating from Kuwait City put white flags on
their vehicles, which were visible to pilots. Consequently, there were claims
that the slaughter of retreating Iraqis and others constituted a war crime, violating “the Geneva Conventions of 1949, Common Article III, which outlaws the killing of soldiers who are out of combat.”71
Joyce Chediac reports that even within the military there was horror at
the mass killing. She cites army intelligence officer Major Bob Nugent who
said “Even in Vietnam I didn’t see anything like this. It’s pathetic.” Nugent
goes on to note that the “one-sided” carnage and “racist mass murder of Arab
people” happened while the U.S. and its coalition partners had promised
that they would not attack Iraqi forces retreating from Kuwait. “This is,” he
said, “surely one of the most heinous war crimes in contemporary history.”72
Media crews traveling with the Allied forces in Kuwait came upon the attack’s aftermath by chance. In his book Hidden Agendas, veteran investigative journalist John Pilger describes the media coverage of the massacre.
In a memorable report for BBC radio, Stephen Sackur described the carnage in
such a way that he separated, for his listeners, ordinary Iraqis from Saddam
Hussein. He converted the ducks, turkeys and fish to human beings. The incinerated figures, he said, were simply people trying to get home. Most newspapers, however, preferred a front-page photograph of a U.S. Army medic attending a wounded Iraqi soldier. Here was the supreme image of magnanimity
and tenderness, a “lifeline” the Daily Mirror called it, and the exact opposite
of what had happened.73
When large-scale ethnic or nationalist violence occurs, people rarely cite
hate propaganda as one of its main causes. “Instead, they think of age-old hatreds between groups as the root cause of these conflicts. Or they blame the
atrocities on the culture of the perpetrators, which is assumed to be inher-
Rallying Racism 57
ently violent,” says Jonathan Belman, who also notes that “While hate propaganda is a common element in conflicts, it is often not a symptom of hatred
between groups. Rather, it is the cause of that hatred.”74
Dehumanization, Atrocity and the Military Identity
In Journalism in the Gulf, Jim Naureckas writes, “The way wars are reported
in the western media follows a depressingly predictable pattern: stage one,
the crisis; stage two, the demonization of the enemy’s leader; stage three, the
demonization of the enemy as individuals; and stage four, atrocities.”75 In applying Naureckas’ outline to the current war on terror, it is easy to find examples identifying each stage. The demonization of Saddam Hussein and the
personification of all Iraqis as terrorists are characteristic of stages two and
three. In the final stage, people find it acceptable, even enjoyable, to degrade
and torture others. Committing atrocities becomes officially or unofficially
sanctioned by those in command in the name of the necessities of war. Dehumanization makes such actions permissible. Sociologists and historians see
this process as central to all types of wars. According to Naureckas, throughout history, in times of domestic and international conflict, state-organized
dehumanization tactics asserting the inferiority of another group have been
directed against racial or ethnic groups, nationalities, immigrants or “foreigners,” religious groups, sexes, sexual minorities, disabled people as a class,
economic and social classes, and many other groups.
In times of war, soldiers are sent into battle to subdue enemy forces. Motivated by retaliation or the desire for conquest, armies are seldom content to
simply capture opponents or drive them out. The most effective tactic is to
kill as many of their people, soldiers and civilians, as possible. Yet there is
something psychologically unnatural about people killing their own kind.
This is not simply an ethical comment: scientific studies have shown that
killing, even in war, involves forcing soldiers to overcome powerful mental
barriers, which normally create resistance to the idea of taking the life of another human. “In war, you are crossing a line you never expected to cross,”
says Lt. Col. Spencer Campbell, an expert on combat stress at Fort Bragg,
N.C. “So you question, ‘If my wife knew what I was capable of, would she
show affection for me? And having done what I have done, how do I nurture
my children?’”76
Dr. Dave Grossman, a professor of military science at Arkansas State University, conducts scholarly studies on the destructive acts of war. This field of
study, known as “killology,” suggests that when soldiers are placed in highpressure combat situations, they stop thinking with their forebrain, the part
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Chapter Three
of the brain which makes us human, and begin thinking with the mid-brain,
or mammalian brain, which is generally indistinguishable from that of an animal. Military leaders throughout history have gone to great lengths to train
soldiers to suppress or override resistance to violence in order to enable them
to kill on command. This response was observed in human combat by
Brigadier-General SLA Marshall, an American military historian who studied the behavior of soldiers from 1943 to 1945. He discovered that during
World War II, only 15 percent of riflemen ever fired their weapons on enemy
soldiers. Even in elite and battle-hardened units, this figure rarely rose above
25 percent. The soldiers held their positions or advanced conscientiously;
they simply exhibited a clear reluctance to open fire on enemy soldiers. Marshall concludes, “when left to their own devices, the great majority of individual combatants throughout history appear to have been unable or unwilling to kill.”77
Once this discovery was made, military programs were created to overcome this innate reluctance. Special psychological conditioning was used to
make shooting other humans easier and more reflexive. By the Korean War,
the firing rate by soldiers had been increased to 55 percent; it reached up to
95 percent at the height of the Vietnam war. Grossman points out a corresponding increase in exposure to violence in society during this time. He argues that the “breakdown of American society, combined with the violence
depicted in the media and interactive video games, is conditioning our children to kill in a manner similar to the army’s conditioning of soldiers.”78 According to Grossman, “We are reaching that stage of desensitization at which
the infliction of pain and suffering has become a source of entertainment: vicarious pleasure rather than revulsion. We are learning to kill, and we are
learning to like it.”79 Grossman’s comments detail the ways in which the reluctance to kill other human beings can be effectively overcome through psychological manipulation and training. While this may make what some consider to be a better soldier, we might question the emotional cost of
overriding these instincts.
Part of the cost comes to the psyche of those conditioned to resist such instincts. Army suicides are at their highest rate in 26 years. The suicide rate
represents more than 17.3 soldiers per 100,000 troops, compared with 9.1 per
100,000 in 2001.80 The suicide rate in the military is traditionally lower than
that of the general population; the fact that, following Iraq, it is now higher
indicates that something, somewhere, is going badly wrong.
Suicide is only one expression of the damaged psyche; the Iraq conflict
was replete with many others. The New England Journal of Medicine reports
19.5 percent of troops who served in Iraq had moderate or severe mental
Rallying Racism 59
health problems. If milder symptoms such as anxiety are included, the number rises to 27.9 percent. By December 2003, the majority of the 8,581 medical evacuations from Iraq that were unrelated to combat were mental health
evacuations. The impact on soldiers is reflected in rising suicide rates, high
percentages of low personal and unit morale and the number of troops sent
home for emotional disorders. Soldiers have been changed irreparably by
their experience. They, too, are dehumanized and diminished when they inflict suffering and death upon others, and this is even more true when a feeling of enjoyment is associated with the killing. Marshall concludes, “It is,
therefore, reasonable to believe that the average and healthy individual—
the man who can endure the mental and physical stresses of combat—still
has such an inner and usually unrealized resistance to killing a fellow man
that he will not of his own volition take life if it is possible to turn away from
the responsibility. . . . At a vital point he becomes a conscientious objector,
unknowingly.”81
Even if this objection happens solely in the individual consciousness, it
can create guilt or unease. Stan Goff, a Vietnam veteran, admits that he
changed in Vietnam and “they were not nice changes either.”82 He speaks of
craving other people’s pain and becoming someone “who desired the rush of
omnipotence that comes with setting someone’s house on fire just for the
pure hell of it, or who could kill anyone, man, woman, or child, with hardly
a second thought. We had to dehumanize our victims before we did the
things we did.”83 Not surprisingly, the torment of dealing with these conflicting emotions takes a toll that lingers long after the conflict has ended.
Herold Noel, Private First Class in the U.S. Army, said “The things we had
to do over there . . . we left our souls in Iraq.”84 Individual soldiers are often
left with guilt and grief. Ronald W. Maris, a professor emeritus of psychiatry
at the University of South Carolina, says that “World War I and World War
II seemed a little more righteous in that there was an initial aggression by an
enemy that we didn’t start”; this did “not apply to Vietnam and not to
Iraq.”85 He adds that public debate over the war can cause soldiers to further
question themselves. “When troops first start out,” explains independent
journalist Dahr Jamail in an interview with David Barsamian, “they believe
their mission is to help the Iraqi people. They believe their presence is linked
to maintaining American security. But after three to four months, that’s
gone,” he says. “They realize they’re in the heart of a brutal guerilla war,
which they are losing, where anyone, anywhere can attack them. They begin
indiscriminate shooting. That cycle continues as they further dehumanize
Iraqis because they don’t have the help they need to deal psychologically
with the situation.”86
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In an effort to reduce the guilt of non-combatants back at home, knowledge of atrocities is often suppressed. The American government has made
extraordinary efforts to conceal the horrors of war from the public. In an attempt to “sanitize” the war, President George W. Bush gave assurances that
American “high tech weaponry” only strikes “the really bad guys.”87 Other
measures by the government to limit public exposure to war images include
buying up all rights to satellite photographs of battle fields and banning photos of the caskets of dead U.S. soldiers, lest the public be reminded that war
involves the death of other human beings. It also carefully refrains from
counting enemy dead (“We don’t do body counts”)88 to hide death tolls that
human rights agencies say could range up to a three-quarters of a million
Iraqi men, women, and children.89
Despite this level of control exercised over the media, modern technology
foiled these efforts with the release of photos of U.S. soldiers abusing Iraqi
prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison. Thanks to cell phone cameras and electronic
mail, some of the most graphic and shocking evidence of the dehumanization
and brutalization of Arabs and Muslims by American soldiers have eluded
censorship and became public. A friend of U.S. Private Lynndie England,
who was shown grinning in several of the Abu Ghraib photo and was eventually convicted for her role in the abuse, told a media conference that the
“country boys” in their West Virginia hometown “feel that if you are of a different nationality or race, you are subhuman.”90 This attitude is not limited
to “country boys”; Seymour Hersh, who broke the Abu Ghraib story in the
New Yorker, quotes a U.S. Army military policeman who, in describing an act
of abuse on an Iraqi prisoner, referred to the prisoner as “it” rather than “he.”
These attitudes provide insight into the mentality of people capable of degrading other human beings through physical and psychological torture. It is
the almost inevitable result of what happens when people are conditioned to
regard an enemy as something less than human. “What is common between
the images of American soldiers laughing at naked and humiliated Iraqi prisoners, the video of a terrorist group in Iraq slaughtering an American civilian, and the photos of an Iraqi mob desecrating and hanging the bodies of
four American private commandos on March 31st in Fallujah?” Abdul Malik Mujahid asks rhetorically in “Demonization of Muslims Caused the Iraq
Abuse.” “It is the hatred and inhumanity of the people doing it.”
When we consider the uses of race in fomenting war, dehumanizing the
enemy and rallying hatred, our minds might readily leap to Nazi Germany,
one of the most analyzed and documented genocide attempts in history. Nazi
propaganda was, Stig Hornshoj-Miller says, by today’s standards “both crude
and transparent.”91 Yet the persistence and resilience of even the most obvi-
Rallying Racism 61
ous of its metaphors demonstrate that our current propaganda is not entirely
different in kind. While we might have moved a long way from the crude manipulations, low-tech effects and often bizarre narration of Nazi propaganda
films, we still employ racist fears and racist discourse to catalyze the systematic dehumanization of the enemy. The infamous rallies at Nuremberg during Hitler’s rise in power drew thousands of people to propaganda events designed to showcase the power of the Third Reich and rally racist hostility
against non-Aryans. The rallies could not have existed without the earlier,
more potent, more systematic rallying of race accomplished by the Nazi message of hatred and difference. What we must require of ourselves now is a
counter-measure to the protocols of dehumanization we have seen endure
across time. In the name of both our own humanity and our enemy’s, we must
now rally a thoughtful, critical energy to examine, resist and refuse collaboration in the ongoing rhetoric of hate.
Notes
1. Sam Keen. Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination. New York:
Harper Collins, Reprint edition, September 1991: 60–61.
2. Sam Keen interviewed in Bill Jersey and Jeffrey Friedman. Faces of the Enemy
[Videorecording]. California NewsReel, 1987.
3. Sam Keen. Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination.
4. Sam Keen interviewed in Bill Jersey and Jeffrey Friedman.
5. Susan Opotow. “Aggression and Violence.” In The Handbook of Conflict Resolution: Theory and Practice. Morton Deutsch and Peter T. Coleman, eds. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 2000: 403–27.
6. Sam Keen. Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination.
7. Hannan Ashrawi. “Anatomy of Racism.” Z. October 18, 2000. See www.zmag
.org/meastwatch/anatomy_of_racism.htm (June 26, 2007).
8. Gregory H. Stanton. “The 8 Stages of Genocide.” Genocide Watch. 1996. See
www.genocidewatch.org/8stages1996.htm (June 26, 2007).
9. Gregory H. Stanton. “The 8 Stages of Genocide.”
10. Gregory H. Stanton. “The 8 Stages of Genocide.”
11. Barbara Rudolph. “Racism in the Ranks.” Time Magazine. January 30, 1995.
12. Gregory H. Stanton. “The 8 Stages of Genocide.”
13. David Stannard. American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1993: 185.
14. Darold Wax. “A People of Beastly Living: Europe, Africa and the Atlantic
Slave Trade. Phylon, Vol. 41, No. 1. 1980: 12–24: 14.
15. David Brion Davis. “The Problem of Slavery.” In Slavery, Secession and Southern History, Robert Louis Paquette and Louis A. Ferleger (eds). Charlottesville, VA:
University Press of Virginia, 2000.
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16. Marie Jenkins Schwartz. Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006.
17. University of Mississippi Libraries. “Scientists Say Negro Still in Ape Stage.”
Inventory of the Klu Klux Klan collection. See www.olemiss.edu/depts/general_library/
files/archives/collections/guides/latesthtml/MUM00254.html (June 26, 2007).
18. David Stannard. American Holocaust.
19. David Stannard. American Holocaust.
20. Catologue entry for Crockett’s Almanac. Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and
Baltimore: Fisher & Brothers, 1841, 1847, and 1852. The Theodore H. Koundakjian
Collection of American Humour. See bancroft.berkeley.edu/Exhibits/nativeamericans/
10.html (June 26, 2007).
21. Crockett’s Almanac. Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Baltimore: Fisher &
Brothers, 1841, 1847, and 1852. The Theodore H. Koundakjian Collection of American Humour. See bancroft.berkeley.edu/Exhibits/nativeamericans/10.html (June 26,
2007).
22. Crockett’s Almanac.
23. Maureen Konkle. Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of
Historiography, 1827–1863. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
24. Richard Drinnon. Facing West: The Metaphysics of Indian-Hating and EmpireBuilding. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997: 53.
25. Hugh Brackenridge. Quoted in The Literature of Justification. Lehigh University
Digital Library. See digital.lib.lehigh.edu/trial/justification/about/soundbites/ (June 26,
2007).
26. David Stannard. American Holocaust.
27. John Dower. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1986.
28. John Dower. War without Mercy.
29. John Dower. War without Mercy.
30. Colliers, December 12, 1942. Reprinted in Keen, Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination.
31. Anthony V. Navarro. “A Critical Comparison between Japanese and American Propaganda during World War II.” Posted on website of Michigan State University. See www.msu.edu/~navarro6/srop.html (June 26, 2007).
32. Anthony V. Navarro. “A Critical Comparison between Japanese and American Propaganda during World War II.”
33. John Hersey. Into the Valley: A Skirmish of the Marines. New York: Knopf,
1943: 56.
34. Anthony V. Navarro. “A Critical Comparison between Japanese and American Propaganda during World War II.”
35. Celia Roy. “The Bug-eyed Monkeys of Tojo: Using Animal Metaphors to
Widen Racial Schisms.” See journals.iranscience.net:800/mcel.pacificu.edu/mcel.
pacificu.edu/jwasia/reviews/seebeesCR.html (August 27, 2003).
36. Celia Roy. “The Bug-eyed Monkeys of Tojo.”
Rallying Racism 63
37. David Stannard. American Holocaust.
38. Ernie Pyle cited in John Dower. War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon Books, 1986: 78.
39. Douglas Linder. “The My Lai Courts-Martial” posted on website of University of
Missouri-Kansas Law School.1999. See www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/mylai/
mylai.htm (June 26, 2007).
40. Douglas Linder. “The My Lai Courts-Martial.”
41. Socialist Worker. “The American way of war crimes.” Socialist Worker Online.
June 9, 2006. See www.socialistworker.org/2006-1/592/592_06_AmericanWay.shtml
(June 26, 2007).
42. Norman Nakamura. “The Nature of GI racism during the Vietnam War.” Gidra,
June/July 1970. Posted on Model Minority. See modelminority.com/modules.php?name=
News&file=article&sid=74 (June 26, 2007).
43. Socialist Worker. “The American way of war crimes.”
44. Joe Allen. “Vietnam: The War the U.S. Lost.” International Socialist Review,
January/February 2004. See www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Asia/Vietnam_War_US_
Lost.html (June 26, 2007).
45. James Duffy cited in Joe Allen. “Vietnam: The War the U.S. Lost.” International Socialist Review, January/February 2004. See www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Asia
/Vietnam_War_US_Lost.html> (June 26, 2007).
46. Sam Keen. Faces of the Enemy.
47. Sam Keen. Faces of the Enemy.
48. Sam Keen. Faces of the Enemy.
49. Wolfgang Mieder. “Proverbs in Nazi Germany: The Promulgation of AntiSemitism and Stereotypes through Folklore.” The Journal of American Folklore. Volume 95, Issue 378, 1982: 435–64.
50. Richard Grunberger, Twelve-Year Reich: A Social History of Nazi Germany. New
York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1971.
51. Cited in Kathryn Ruud. “Liberal Parasites and Other Creepers.” In At War with
Words. Mirjana Dedaic and Daniel Nelson (eds). New York: Mouton de Gruter. 2003.
52. Stig Hornshoj-Moller. “On the Eternal Jew.” Holocaust-History, 1999. See
www.holocaust-history.org/der-ewige-jude/ (June 26, 2007).
53. Stig Hornshoj-Moller. “Still Images from the Eternal Jew.” Holocaust-History,
1999. See www.holocaust-history.org/der-ewige-jude/stills.shtml (June 26, 2007).
54. Stig Hornshoj-Moller. “Still Images from the Eternal Jew.”
55. Mary Mills. “Propaganda and Children during the Hitler Years.” The Nizkor
Project. See www.nizkor.org/hweb/people/m/mills-mary/mills-00.html (June 26, 2007).
56. Wolfgang Mieder. “Proverbs in Nazi Germany.”
57. Andreas Musolff. “What role do metaphors play in racial prejudice? The function of antisemitic imagery in Hitler’s Mein Kampf.” Patterns of Prejudice. Volume 41,
Issue 1. February 2007: 21–43.
58. Danish WWII, Propaganda. Reprinted in Keen Faces of the Enemy: Reflections
of the Hostile Imagination. op. cit.
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59. Danish WWII, Propaganda.
60. Human Rights Watch. Leave None to Tell the Story: Genocide in Rwanda. Human Rights Watch. April 1, 2004. See www.hrw.org/reports/1999/rwanda/ (June 26,
2007).
61. Cited in Edward Said. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books, 1979: 252.
62. Media Matters for America. “Savage advocated “kill[ing] 100 million” Muslims.” Media Matters for America. April 19, 2006. See mediamatters.org/items/20060
4190001 (June 26, 2007).
63. Jonathan Belman. “A Cockroach cannot give birth to a butterfly and other
messages of hate propaganda.”Peace, War and Human Nature. May 2004. See www.gse
.harvard.edu/~t656_web/peace/Articles_Spring_2004/Belman_Jonathan_hate_prop
aganda.htm (June 27, 2007).
64. Jonathan Belman. “A Cockroach cannot give birth to a butterfly.”
65. Kellner, Douglas. The Persian Gulf TV War. San Francisco: Westview Press, 1992.
66. John Stauber and Sheldon Rampton. Toxic Sludge Is Good for You. Monroe,
ME: Common Courage Press, 1995.
67. Mike Buckingham. “1991 massacre of thousands of fleeing Iraqi troops was part
of U.S. ‘total war.’” Hartford Web Publishing. February 8, 2003. See www.hartford-hwp
.com/archives/27c/069.html (June 26, 2007).
68. Michael Albert. “After the “Turkey Shoot.” Z. See www.zmag.org/zmag/articles
/albertold19.htm (June 26, 2007).
69. Ramsey Clark. “War Crimes: A Report on United States War Crimes against
Iraq.” War Crimes: A report on United States War Crimes against Iraq. New York: Maisonneuve Press, 1992.
70. Kellner, Douglas. The Persian Gulf TV War.
71. Joyce Chediac. “The Massacre of Withdrawing Soldiers on The Highway of
Death.” In War Crimes: A report on United States War Crimes against Iraq. Ramsey
Clark et al. New York: Maisonneuve Press, 1992.
72. Joyce Chediac. “The Massacre of Withdrawing Soldiers on The Highway of
Death.”
73. Daily Mirror (UK), March 2, 1991. Cited in John Pilger, Hidden Agendas. New
York: The New Press. 1998.
74. Jonathan Belman. “A Cockroach cannot give birth to a butterfly.”
75. Jim Naureckas. “Journalism in the Gulf” in Janine Jackson and Jim Naureckas
(Eds). The Fair Reader: An Extra! Review of Press and Politics in the ‘90s. Boulder, CO:
Westview Press, 1996.
76. Lt. Col. Spencer Campbell cited in Ann Scott Tyson. “The other battle: coming home.” The Christian Science Monitor. July 9, 2003. See www.csmonitor.com
/2003/0709/p01s03-usmi.html (June 26, 2007).
77. Killology Research Group.”Psychological Effects of Combat.” Killology Research
Group. 1999. See www.killology.com/art_psych_resistance.htm (June 26, 2007).
78. Dave Grossman. On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and
Society. New York: Little Brown, 1998.
Rallying Racism 65
79. Dave Grossman. On Killing.
80. Associated Press. “Army Suicides Highest in 26 years.” August 16, 2007.
81. Andy Newman. “US Army feels the strain.” Socialist Unity Network. September 2004. See www.socialistunitynetwork.co.uk/news/strain.htm (June 26, 2007).
82. Stan Goff. “Hold On to Your Humanity: An Open Letter to GIs in Iraq.” Military Families Speak Out. See www.mfso.org/article.php?id=225 (June 26, 2007).
83. Stan Goff. “Hold On to Your Humanity.”
84. Cited in Patricia Foulkrod. The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends. [Videorecording]. 2006.
85. Theola Labbé. “Suicides in Iraq, Questions at Home Pentagon Tight-Lipped
as Self-Inflicted Deaths Mount in Military.” Washington Post. February 19, 2004.
86. David Barsamian. “Dateline Baghdad: An Interview with Dahr Jamail.” Z. December 2005. See zmagsite.zmag.org/Dec2005/barsamian1205.html (June 26, 2007).
87. George W. Bush cited in Norman Solomon. “Picture-perfect killers: Military
weapons are often technological marvels but always instruments of death.” San Francisco Chronicle. June 19, 2005.
88. Edward Epstein. “How many Iraqis died?” San Francisco Chronicle. May 3, 2003.
89. John Tirman. “Study: More Than 600,000 Dead in Iraq.” AlterNet. October
11, 2006. See www.alternet.org/waroniraq/42867/ (June 26, 2007).
90. Marina Hyde. “This Week.” Guardian. May 8, 2004.
91. Stig Hornshoj-Moller. “On the Eternal Jew.”
P A R T
T W O
ENLISTING DISCOURSE
C H A P T E R
F O U R
Rats in the Trap:
Animal Metaphors in the News
Words are loaded pistols.
—Jean Paul Sartre
Symbolism of the Animal Metaphor
The historically resonant metaphors of dehumanization discussed in Part I
retain a striking and consequential currency today. The three case studies
that comprise Part II focus on how these dehumanizing metaphors continue
to circulate through our contemporary media, in print journalism, political
cartoons, and talk radio, respectively. In each case, there is a connection between the remarkably consistent and sometimes overlapping metaphorical
frames that figure the enemy-Other as animal and disease, and some of the
most horrifying practices that have surfaced in the war on terror. Examining
the symbolism of the animal metaphor in detail provides a useful point of departure.
Across wars and across cultures, animal metaphors have persisted as a central component in representing the fabricated enemy. Within the metaphorical frames constructed by our public discourses, animals operate as recurring
symbols, offering us a condensed cognitive code that allows a single image to
call up complex emotional and intellectual associations. Kenneth Burke has
suggested that the generation of symbols is part of what defines us as human;
“Man,” he states, “is the symbol-using animal.”1 Like metaphor, symbolism so
saturates our culture that it is often effectively invisible; it permeates our
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everyday language as well as art, poetry, religion, legal customs, and advertising. Single icons or images can evoke extraordinarily complex symbolic intersections, rooted in lengthy and evolving traditions. Over time, symbols
can simplify or broaden, accreting new, expanding meanings. Hans Biedermann notes that “many traditional symbols are ambiguous: they cannot be
explained as having a single, constant meaning. Not every dragon in every
culture is an evil enemy; the heart does not always stand for love.”2 Indeed,
say Biedermann, “real symbols, at different stages, are sources of very different, but always relevant, ‘information.’”3 The rose, for example, as a symbol
that has survived for centuries in art, literature, and religion, has collected
around itself many layers of meanings, some of which contradict or challenge
each other. As associated with the Virgin Mary, the rose symbolizes chastity
and purity, while as associated with sexuality in medieval romance literature,
it symbolizes carnality and sensual bliss, its tightly furled bud a favorite symbol of female virginity, its full-blown blossom a symbol of sexual passion.
Multiple meanings may jostle for dominance around a symbol, or, in contrast, a symbol may over time, come to possess a single, fixed sense. Symbols,
therefore, can enrich language by bringing it an array of different possible
meanings, or they can reinforce a single meaning, as with images that consistently dehumanize. Both kinds of symbols are woven into almost every
level of our public discourse; whenever a signifier communicates something
beyond its literal or concrete sense, we find the workings of symbolism, and
its potential for linking together distinct or unalike things. As with
metaphor, this powerful conjunction of dissimilar things lies at the heart of
symbolism; it is, Arnold Whittick notes, “a bringing together of ideas and objects, one of which expresses the other. The symbol is either an object that
stands for another object, or an object that stands for an idea.”4 Even very
pragmatic, apparently literal activities may be carried out by means of symbolism; what is money but an elaborate, consensual symbolic system, in
which almost identical pieces of paper can be “worth” either one or one hundred dollars? What is a dollar but a collectively agreed-upon symbol in which
something (a bill, a check) stands in for something else (the sum it is valued
at)? Alfred North Whitehead, in fact, observes that society is held together
by its shared acceptance and reverence for its symbolic systems;5 the symbolic
system of currency could not operate without such a consensus.
Through symbols and symbolic rituals we make our everyday actions
more resonant by linking them with larger systems. Harvesting a field, for
example, is both a material act and, as part of a larger symbolic system, a
transcendent activity in which the harvest is figuratively linked to life itself
and celebrated with an appropriate iconography. Symbols thus have the ef-
Rats in the Trap 71
fect of making some aspects of our life larger and more abstract; they allow
us, Lewis Mumford argues, to bring into our lives not just the visible but the
invisible.6 Similarly, the symbols commonly called to the fore in wartime,
such as the flag, crown, or throne, often bring a sense of enlargement to the
activities of war by suggesting noble causes and necessary protections. Biedermann points out that the Aztec civilization’s ritual symbolic trinity of
“sacrificial blood, heart, sun” allowed for human sacrifice, just as the symbols of “Flag, Fuhrer, blood and soil” have allowed for human slaughter.7
Such symbols typically touch us in particularly emotional ways: the symbols
most associated with the natural world, such as light and dark, touch us at
the most primal levels. In the study of symbol analysis, animal images are
seen as potently compressed codes that call up rich associations with a single word, phrase, or image. These compacted messages ideally suit the purposes of war propaganda.
George Lakoff anatomizes the metaphoric systems in which animal symbols have such currency in relation to the war on terror. He notes that immediately after the attacks of September 11, George W. Bush referred to the
terrorists as “cowards,” but that this description seemed at odds with the attackers’ willingness to sacrifice their lives in the service of their ideals. The
descriptors quickly changed from coward to animal: Bush has spoken of
“smoking them out of their holes,” drawing on our symbolic associations with
rodents, and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has spoken of “drying up
the swamp they live in,” an odd choice of metaphor considering the desert
landscape from which the attackers originated. The swamp metaphor, then,
is not grounded in logic or geography, but is based instead in the labyrinthine
but powerful symbolism of the swamp. The swamp has a particularly rich
symbolic geography: in the popular imagination it is a landscape more primitive and more deadly than others, teeming with dangerous things that hide
beneath the brackish waters’ surface and emerge without warning. In popular film, the swamp is generally portrayed as dark and over-run, choked with
entangling vines, full of the mysterious sounds—plops and slithers and
susurrations—that mark it as a site of threat and secrets. The shadowy swamp
potently suggests secrecy, corruption and fetidity, and is the home of an animal life usually regarded with equal distaste: rats, alligators and, especially,
the serpent. The snake as symbol calls up a variety of associations ranging
from corrupting evil (the Devil in Eden) to sexuality and penetration
(Freud’s phallic associations). The conceptual metaphors common to both
Bush and Rumsfeld’s comments, says Lakoff, rest on the assumption that
“Moral Is Up; Immoral Is Down (they are lowly) and Immoral People Are
Animals (that live close to the ground).”8
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The symbolic landscape of lowliness is one found regularly in discussions
of the war. Many news reports draw on the landscape of the low, describing
the hiding places of the enemy as holes, burrows, or lairs, suggesting the subterranean and threatening, a dark place treacherously hiding the fleeing enemy and eroding away the safety of our own “high ground.” Like the Nazi cartoon showing the Jew as rat-in-the-walls, the symbolism of the burrow
suggests not only the presence of the abhorrent rodent, but the rodent’s potency as a threat: it can penetrate and navigate places where humans can’t;
it can survive in such places invisibly, so that we aren’t aware of its threat; it
can penetrate our world of light, open spaces any time it wants, corrupting
the places we imagined safe. When images of swamps and burrows are repeatedly used in public discussion, they cultivate an almost irresistible sense
of threat and incursion, emphasizing the presence of creatures beneath us
that are insidiously and invisibly weakening our strong, safe surfaces.
The language of lair and burrow is found frequently in newspaper headlines. The condensing effect of symbol, in which a large emotional content
can be compressed into a single word, phrase, or picture, makes symbolism
ideal for newspapers. There has been a remarkable similarity in the symbolic
vocabulary used by the news media since the start of the war on terror. Reporters lead their stories with “Raid Zaps Iraqi Rat,”9 “Suspected al-Qaida
Nest,”10 “The Vermin Have Struck Again,”11 and “Viper’s Nest of Terrorism.”12 Examining media sources and public discussions of the war on terror
reveals a pattern of using not just animal symbolism but related metaphors
of the hunt. Reports concerning the war on terror are filled with terms implying the pursuit and capture of an animal, using verbs such as “hunt,”
“trap,” “snare,” “net” and “corral.” The much-used phrase “hunt for terrorists” has widely replaced more neutral verbs like “search” or “look for.”
When the “hunt” is successful, terrorists are “caught in a trap”; the enemy
is described as “scurrying for cover” or “slithering out of our grasp.” The danger in such depictions is the way in which they represent their subjects as
animals to be captured and eliminated. The proliferation of such language
has the effect of justifying it; such phrases come to seem like simple, natural descriptions, rather than motivated, deliberate, symbolic choices that
perform significant ideological work. These phrases, constantly reiterated,
take on a collective force, shaping the conceptual frameworks by which we
understand the war on terror.
The collective force of these reiterated allusions to hunting makes it difficult to conceive of the war on terror in any other terms and limits the imaginative possibilities open to us as we search for solutions. In this way, our
symbols, while they allow for certain actions, actively preclude others. One
Rats in the Trap 73
of the reasons we must pay heightened attention to our symbolic language is
that such language can actually foreclose on our own autonomy; if we insistently figure ourselves as hunters, it becomes increasingly difficult to choose
a different role for ourselves. The hunter seems to possess the autonomy and
control in the hunt, but in many ways the actions open to the hunter are limited: the hunter may stalk, chase, track, snare, wound, kill, or bag, but cannot, by his nature and that of his prey, negotiate, confer, settle, or otherwise
alter the circumstances. Symbolic roles endlessly recirculated through our
language thus lock us into positions that can be surprisingly stringent and
limiting. Within the structures of the hunter-prey diad, the hunter’s role is
also largely responsive and reactive; his actions are largely determined by
what the prey does, where the prey goes. While the image of the Great
Hunter has traditional symbolic associations with courage, triumph, testing
the limits of the self, and so on, it also carries within it some inherent limits
to freedom of choice and autonomy of action.
Despite these limits, media sources have seized eagerly and almost unanimously on the hunt motif. The headlines below and throughout this chapter
come from a range of newspapers with a range of political affiliation; papers
from tabloid to venerated, from left to right of center, have all chosen to echo
the language of the hunt throughout their publications, as have television,
internet, and other broadcast media in their coverage of the war on terror.
Consider the consistency of the hunt symbolism in these sample news media
headlines:
As British close in on Basra, Iraqis scurry away13
Terror Hunt Snares Twenty-five14
Exhausted Saddam Snared15
Coalition Forces Corral Dozens of Insurgents16
Net Closing Around Bin Laden17
Efforts to Trap Terrorists Ensnare Illegal Workers18
Iraq Braggart Bagged19
Pentagon aims to smoke [Saddam] out20
This imagery is reinforced when terrorist hideouts are described as animal
habitats. Common examples describe such places as “underground terrorist
lairs” and “nests of terrorists” instead of as human-constructed hideouts,
bunkers or training camps. A few examples include:
Pakistanis Give up on Lair of Osama21
Terror Nest in Fallujah Is Attacked22
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Britain ‘Is Breeding Ground for Terror’23
Draining the Swamps of ‘Homegrown Terrorism’24
US forces launch major raid on Fallujah insurgency den25
The language of the hunt is not limited to headlines. Indeed, once alert to
it we discover it throughout news media’s coverage. It is spread widely across
different newspapers, writers, and types of writing, from the content of news
articles to editorial opinion, from columnists to letters to the editor. The
headlines here represent only a sample of the evidence documenting the persistence of the hunt motif; in fact, the language employed in the headlines
shown here is reflected in literally tens of thousands of hunt-metaphor and
animal-metaphor phrasings found in newspapers and broadcasts since the
events of September 11. Although they are only a small percentage of what
is publicly said and written about the war on terror, it is worth paying special
attention to headlines because they are, for a large part of the population, a
main source of information; many people glean their knowledge from scanning headlines rather than reading whole articles. George W. Bush acknowledged in the question-and-answer period of a press conference that while he
glances at headlines, he “rarely” reads the articles.26 Bush is not alone in this;
David Ogilvy, successful advertising executive and author of Confessions of an
Advertising Man, has claimed that four out of five people read only news
headlines. Whether in headlines or articles, it is remarkable to consider that
so many different voices have so collectively echoed such a restricted and
repetitive body of images. It is also remarkable to consider how broadly these
words are reaching us: millions of citizens, many avid and eager for “pure” information about the war so they can develop their own ideas about it, are receiving their news entirely through invisible conduits of metaphor. The
shape of these conduits, with the enemy consistently portrayed as beast and
the retaliator as hunter, pre-fabricates for us certain understandings of the
war and our role within it.
Animal symbols can be broken down into different types, and within propagandistic discourse special categories of animal emerge. The term “animal”
in general is often broadly applied to individuals who have committed acts
we find particularly loathsome or heinous; domestically, murderers of children or child pornographers are typically labeled animals. In the war on terror, however, the construction of the enemy often occurs through calling up
particular themes of animal symbolism. After all, the word “animal” can call
up benign associations: animals can be useful, they can be our companions,
they have laws to protect them from cruelty, and they have active, energetic,
vocal public advocates such as PETA and the SPCA working on their behalf.
Rats in the Trap 75
It is worth noticing, then, that when government and media draw upon animal metaphor systems, they call up specific versions of the metaphor, versions that come with a particularly and exclusively negative connotation.
One such version is the “beast,” which we find in multiple headlines:
Chained Beast—Shackled Saddam Dragged to Court27
Death of “wild beast” Dadullah hits Taliban campaign28
Beast who gloried in massacre and torture29
These beasts must pay for sick cruelty30
War in Iraq: a U.S. Walkover in Beast’s Heartland31
Iraq Beasts Hang Kids; Children Butchered in Front of Parents for Talking to Soldiers32
The word beast connotes a particular kind of animal, excluding most benign or even neutral meanings. We might think of the beast as an intensified
animal symbol; a beast is an animal that is wild, fierce, dangerous, brutish, often repugnant (in England, “beastly” is a synonym for nasty or horrid) and
ungovernable. An animal might be tamed, but in the more intense, often
mythical associations surrounding the beast, taming is much less possible.
The bestial and the mythical come together in a headline such as “The beast
with many heads strikes again—Terror in Jakarta.”33 This headline suggests a
related strand of intensified animal imagery, the monster. The monster appears over and over in news media headlines:
Arab world created this suicidal monster34
The Terrorism Monster35
Revolving-Door Monsters 36
Iraqi Monster’s Head Ripped Off; Horror at Execution37
Monster Set to Be New Dad38
Throw out These Monsters Who Prey on the Innocent39
The Terrorism Monster40
These Monsters Are No Freedom-fighters41
Of Monsters and Muslims42
Spare Us the Righteous Tears at the Death of Another Monster43
Monsters Slaughter 24 Children in Iraq44
Monsters have their own rich mythic and pop-culture traditions; they are
hard to kill and, once killed, are often able to return, usually in a more dangerous form. Headlines such as “Bin Laden’s hunted monster has simply
grown more heads”45 reinforce these mythic associations. Even independent
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scholars, consultants, and pundits may use and reinforce these intensified animal symbols; when the ONASA news agency of Bosnia-Herzegovnia publishes a headline proclaiming “Al-Qaeda Metamorphoses into International
Islamist Monster: Experts,”46 we might wonder for a moment what monster
experts are being called upon to comment.
At the other end of the spectrum of animal metaphors are vermin. While
monsters and beasts carry an imposing mythical freight, evoking ideas of
largeness, power, and ungovernability, vermin evoke the opposite. Monsters
may be individual; vermin rarely are. Vermin are characterized by plurality
and mass: where we find one rat or roach, says common wisdom, there will
be a hundred or a thousand more. Relatively harmless in the singular, they
can be deadly en masse: their sheer numbers make them a threat. We do not
speak of a singular vermin; rather, as in this lead line from the NY Daily
News, vermin are inevitably “they”: “And so the vermin have struck again—
as all knew they surely would. Does today there remain any safe haven on
this Earth from beasts who slither out of their murderous holes to wreak their
havoc?”47
Within the category of vermin, rats are seen as particularly loathsome. In
many cultures, rats are equated with destruction, disease, and the spread of
plague. The rat is also associated with untrustworthiness, slyness and ruthless
self-interest; an informer is a “rat”; to “rat” on someone is tantamount to betraying them. In both East and West, the rat is seen as unclean; as a denizen
of earth’s bowels, it “has distinctly anal connotations.”48 While rats are physically most common in places of poverty, they are sometimes figuratively associated with wealth, especially through images of money-grubbing, sinister
greed, and destructive appetite.
When the media labels suspected terrorists, enemy military and political
leaders, and ultimately an entire population as “rodents,” it conjures up a
spectrum of negative cultural associations. It transforms people into vermin,
whose capture and extermination becomes justified and necessary. These
headlines again repeat and solidify the equation of enemy with rat:
Troops Grab 50 in Raid on Afghan Rat’s Nest49
Rats in a Trap: How Feds Snared Fort Dix Terror Plotters50
Hussein’s Rat Hole51
Out of a Rat-hole52
Americans Cleared out Rats’ Nest in Afghanistan53
Fallujah: ‘It’s a Rats’ Nest’54
This Rat’s Better off Dead55
Rats in the Trap 77
In 2003, the UK’s BBC broadcasting described souvenir T-shirts, available
for purchase at the American military detention site in Guantánamo Bay,
Cuba, depicting a rat wearing a turban, orange jumpsuit and shackles, with
the words Guantánamo Bay: Taliban Lodge inscribed around it. Another depicts six shackled rats in orange jumpsuits, surrounded by the caption Al
Qaeda six-pack—Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, Home of the Sand Rat.56
There is one significant exception to the general aversion to rats; for a
troop of soldiers with the long-standing nickname of the Desert Rats, the
label is a venerable one. The British 7th Armoured Brigade, or Desert
Rats, is considered to have “one of the proudest histories in the British
Army.”57 Formed in 1940, it was charged with stemming the Axis advance
in North Africa and protecting the vital Suez Canal, and fought a dogged
campaign against Rommel’s forces at the battle of El Alamein in 1942.
The troops adopted the nickname after the emblem on their shoulder
badge, a small desert creature called a jerboa. After the war, they continued wearing the jerboa insignia. In October 1990 the Brigade was deployed to the Gulf War, and in 1994 to Bosnia–Herzegovnia. They are currently serving in Iraq.58 The Desert Rats are “our” rats, perhaps more
affiliated with the cute, clean white rats sold by pet stores than with the
filthy, insidious, threatening enemy-rat. As Biedermann observes, “not
every dragon” is “an evil enemy”59; likewise, not every rat is vermin. Significantly, however, the rats that are symbolically most loathsome are
those consistently identified with the enemy. The jerboa on the soldier’s
badge is drawn in a remarkably different mode than the rat images employed in images of the enemy Other. Enemy-rat images emphasize the
rat’s grim-looking jaws, replete with prominent fangs and razor-sharp
teeth; in the Desert Rat pennant, no teeth at all are visible. In two different insignias designed by Edward Mooney and Todd Mills, in fact, the jerboa featured is standing quite adorably on its hind legs, tiny paws positioned like those of a pet taught to beg on command. The upright posture
of the jerboa in both images provides a clue to how different good rats are
from bad, enemy rats. It suggests forthrightness: these rats are not a subterranean threat; they don’t scurry along in swamps and sewers, wearing
away our firm footing. Instead, they are charmingly human in their posture, far from the lowly squirmer beneath the ground or deep in the walls.
It’s also worth noting that the badge and pennant depict a single rat, not
the teeming masses interspersed with Jewish faces in Der Ewige Jude. C.
Douglas Lummis observes that when the terrorist is shown as a rat, it is
most often the gutter rat: “Not the white rat or the brown country rat, but
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the plague rat, the one that is never displayed in zoos and that no one (except witches) ever keeps as pets. The plague rat, like the cockroach, exists
in popular imagination . . . as an animal to be killed on sight, and exterminated if possible.”60 In “our rat” headlines, “good rats” are treated affectionately, in marked contrast to the enemy-rat:
Desert Rats’ leader warns on risk of armed uprising in Basra61
Desert Rat becomes 99th to die in Iraq62
Desert Rat to meet the Queen63
My Dad, the Desert Rat64
Another suggestive application of rodent symbols to enemies who are not
racially othered is evident in the labeling of opponents to Bush’s war on Iraq
and Afghanistan as weasels. While seen as neither as destructive nor as
loathsome as the rat, the weasel still has an unsavory reputation: it combines
perceived qualities of treachery, sneakiness, and cowardice. With its long,
sinuous body, it can worm its way into narrow spaces; it lives on the surface
but can crawl underground using other creatures’ tunnels; it can back its way
out of very tight places. According to Jose A. Carillo,65 on of the scale of
treachery the weasel ranks above even carrion-animals like the jackal or vulture: a “weasel” is an untrustworthy, deceitful person; to “weasel out” means
to escape commitments or responsibilities. Even words that are perceived as
weak or slippery are called “weasel words.”
When politicians and media label the leaders of Western countries opposing the war on terror weasels, these associations of cowardly vacillation,
betrayal, and deceptive self-interest are effectively called up. The U.S. presents itself as betrayed by those “weaseling out” of their foreign policy obligations. The evocative symbolic connotations of the weasel imply a lack of integrity in these leaders and the country they represent. The New York Post,
especially, seems to delight in characterizing opponents of the war this way.
In huge, tabloid-style black letters, its various headlines declare:
Axis of Weasel: Germany and France Wimp out on Iraq66
It’s Showdown Time at the UN as Powell Takes on the Euro-weasels67
Stop! Goes the Weasel as Euros Back Bush68
McCain: Be Nice to Weasels69
Weasels Paid Thugs Ransom70
Other newspapers echoed this language:
Rats in the Trap 79
Mexico gets free pass despite behaving like weasel in war debate71
Sniffing Profits; with Iraq’s Fall Imminent, the Axis of Weasels Want a
Piece of the Action72
Axis of Weasels Must Not Profit from the Reconstruction of Iraq73
This persistent symbolization seems to suggests the dangers of dallying too
closely or too sympathetically with rats; such proximity might not make you
a rodent, but it certainly rubs off, lowering you in others’ eyes and in the
metaphoric landscape.
Another significant animal symbol is the snake, especially the viper. In
western culture, the serpent is commonly a symbol of evil; Satan famously took
the form of a serpent to trick Eve into offering Adam forbidden fruit. Popular
culture has enthusiastically played with the snake as a primal fear, from horror
movies about giant snakes to snakes on a plane. In Western cultures, it’s difficult to find positive models for the snake; the West has largely forgotten or suppressed the traditional association of the snake with healing present in many
non-Christian cultures. The symbolic snakes twined around the caduceus in
the ancient sign for physician is perhaps our last surviving link to this benign
association. Whittick argues that in western art and ecclesiastical design, the
snake shows up as “the Christian typification of the forces of evil, opposing and
vanquished by the godly forces of righteousness.”74 The snake’s malevolent role
is most strikingly depicted in conjunction with the eagle, the latter representing righteousness overcoming evil. This image was employed as early as in
Homer’s Iliad, in which an eagle carrying a bleeding snake in its talons appeared before the Greek heroes as an omen of their success over the Trojans.
Vipers, particularly treacherous serpents, also have a rich symbolic history:
young vipers, gnawing though the belly of their mother, symbolized children
plotting against their parents. In the 16th century, the viper signified “a common woman or harlot” ready to “sting men with lust.”75 The symbolism of
snake and viper communicates the idea that our opponents possess a drive to
poison us that is, like a snake’s, instinctive, natural and irresistible. The serpent will strike simply because that is its nature. There is no arguing with a
snake, no reasoning with it; its deadliness is fundamental and inarguable.
When confronted with an aroused and lethal snake, the only rational response is a deadly counterattack. These symbolic associations are repeatedly
reflected in headlines identifying the enemy with snake, serpent, and viper:
Brave Brit Smashes Vipers’ Nest76
US Report Calls for War on ‘Principal Nest of Terrorist Vipers’77
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Port City of 14 [million] Harbours Viper’s Nest of Terrorism78
The Viper Awaits79
The Snake Leaves the Desert80
Snake with a Taste in Scandinavian Models-Hussein’s Greed81
Former Arab Power Is ‘Poisonous Snake’82
Britain Bitten By A Snake; Country Failed to Crack Down on Those Who
Incited Hatred and Murder”83
Like the symbol of the snake as a natural enemy, the spider is also a symbolically primal foe. The spider archetype has a long history and is traditionally associated with Fate, a teacher, destroyer, or trickster. Perhaps it is this
trickster image that allows such a strong link to be made between Saddam
Hussein’s hiding place and a spider hole. A media content analysis of the
words “spider hole” results in lists of stories about the capture of Saddam.
When Lt. General Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, informed the media about the conclusion of the search, he said Saddam “was
caught in a spider hole.” The phrase was quickly adopted in the media and
employed in almost every subsequent article about the capture. Something
about this image clearly captured the attention of the public: the term “spider hole” rapidly entered widespread use and was named one of the ten top
phrases of 2003.84
The term has a specific military history; during the American Civil War
it referred to a hastily-dug foxhole. In WWII, it came to refer to a oneperson foxhole, a hole in the earth used for stealthy attack by Japanese
forces in many Pacific battlefields. Usually deeper than a foxhole, spider
holes are covered over and used in ambushes. In her article “Spider Hole:
the Origin of the Species,” Washington Post journalist Libby Copeland addresses the metaphor directly. She writes that “the phrase conjures the lair
of a sneaky, ugly, menacing creature, a thing so dumb and degraded it lives
only to kill and be killed. On the food chain, the arachnid is below the dog,
the pig and even the rat, the most popular subhuman beings we use to label folks we don’t like.”85 In an interesting twist in the discussion, Linda
Rayor, an assistant professor of entomology at Cornell University, took umbrage over the connection between the spider and Saddam Hussein. She
told the Washington Post that references to Saddam Hussein’s hideout as a
spider hole was “an insult to spiders.”86 The public adopted the phrase readily, as in the joke “your self-esteem is lower than Saddam Hussein’s spider
hole.”87 The joke hearkens back to Lakoff’s conceptual metaphor of lowliness: we are high and the enemy is low; the worse the enemy, the lower the
place he occupies.
Rats in the Trap 81
Like the spider hole, the spider web is common to media and political language. “Web of terror” is now the dominant phrase used to describe possible
or actual terrorist networks. The web as a symbol for terrorism calls up potent associations of entrapment going back to childhood: Miss Muffet’s spider; spiders put down the back of playground victims; the nursery rhyme spider that fatally invites the fly to “Come into my parlor.” Calling up the
spider’s resonant images of threat, the Charleston, South Carolina, Post and
Courier ran the headline, “Attacking al-Qaida’s terror webs,” and reported on
a “spider’s web of Islamic radicals.”88 This language frequently accompanies
exhortations to “wipe out” or “exterminate” these “spider webs of terror.” We
can find further spider references in headlines such as,
Saddam Caught; U.S. Troops Find Tyrant Hiding in a Spider-hole89
Saddam’s “Spider Hole” Could Be Destroyed90
“Spider Hole” Fits Saddam91
Saddam Captured; Nine-month Search Ends in ‘Spider Hole’; Hussein
Loyalist’s Tip Led to Dictator92
Sub-human images of the enemy also take the form of other kinds of insect life; newspaper accounts draw on a repertoire of creepy-crawly symbols,
all of which consistently emphasize the enemy’s toxic, noxious, or pestilential nature. This is especially true in the equation of the enemy to a cockroach, an insect largely considered to be the “least loved of all nonhumans.”93 Cockroaches are associated with filth and disease and are often
shown as natural enemies in horror and science fiction films. Some examples
of cockroach and other insect symbolism appear in the following headlines:
Operation Desert Pest94
Terrorists, like rats and cockroaches, skulk in the dark95
A Washington homecoming for a cockroach96
Taking Military Advice From The Cockroach Conqueror97
U.S., Iraqi forces find “hornet’s nest” in Fallujah98
American troops kill 40 in “hornet’s nest”; Battles around Najaf as rebels
come under fire99
Killing of protesters stirs up Sunni hornet’s nest100
In Fallujah; Push South Greeted By “Hornet’s Nest”101
Such language is repeated in the words of a political commentator who
recommends that Americans leave the “hunt” for Osama bin Laden to Pakistani forces because Pakistanis would be less conspicuous to locals. The
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writer refers to this as “using one evil to end another evil.” The article explains, “Sending in over-equipped and over-confident Marines and Green
Berets to catch bin Laden would be like sending in an army of elephants to
catch a cockroach. One must use a cockroach to catch a cockroach.”102
These persistent symbols have logical linguistic extensions; once we have
confirmed that our enemy is a cockroach, we seem to move inexorably to a
corollary discussion of extermination and eradication. Like bugs, our enemies
are there for the squashing; we need have no more compunction about wiping them out than we have in wiping out a roach colony from under our
kitchen sink or a hornet’s nest from our back porch.
There is one other recurring low-animal metaphor in the rhetoric surrounding the war on terror. Within this metaphor the enemy is not only inhuman, he is not even a mammal, not even a visible organism. Instead, in
this representation, the enemy is something utterly alien: the microbial, the
bacterial, the viral, or the cancerous. These metaphors are invoked in headlines such as:
Al Qaeda Mutating Like a Virus103
Like Cancer Cells, Terrorist Organizations Are Proliferating104
Stop Sectarian “Cancer” in Iraq, Urges UN105
The Terrorist Virus Is No Lightweight Matter. We Must Contain Its
Spread106
Al-Jazeera Notes Blair’s Warning of “Virus of Islamic Extremism”107
Headscarf Is a Cancer in Turkey108
Root out This Cancer of Evil109
Ridding Islam of the Cancer Within110
When the enemy is a disease-bug, as when he is an insect-bug, extermination and eradication become the logical, responsible, even humane response. In normal circumstances, when applied to humans, these words
evoke historical memories of genocide, and we have an inbuilt resistance to
them. When, within the intensified rhetoric of wartime, the humanity of the
enemy-Other has been systematically compromised through such insistent
metaphors and such highly charged symbolism, we are more willing to annihilate: we seek not just to vanquish the enemy but to erase him utterly.
When we speak of eradicating terrorists, we employ a word most commonly
used when speaking of wiping out diseases or infestations. In the eradication
model, we don’t scruple to kill the whole colony; it would be ludicrous to try
to separate out the individual bugs which have harmed us. When we extend
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the eradication model to the fabricated enemy, we likewise don’t distinguish
between those who harm us and those who seem indistinguishably like them.
When racist metaphor dehumanizes an entire population, we may come to
see them as so different from ourselves that it is no longer possible to see ourselves mirrored in their suffering.
That we have already slipped into a widespread public metaphor of extermination is clear from news media language such as this:
The purpose of engagement is not to win friends and popularity. It is instead to find and utterly annihilate the enemy—in this case all those
secular and Islamists dedicated to our own destruction.111
Good progress is certainly being made in the extermination of dispersed
Saddamite opposition.112
Live with terrorism or go all-out to eradicate it.113
Newspaper headlines also echo this language:
Cleansing of Foreign Evils a “Good Thing”114
Kuwait Vows to Exterminate Terrorists115
The extermination of Saddam Hussein116
Exterminating the [Iraqi] regime117
Iraqi PM Vows to “Annihilate” Terrorist Groups118
Saudi King Vows to Annihilate Al-qaeda119
Iraq Premier Forms Security Service to “Annihilate” Terrorists120
Allies “Wipe out Iraqi Division”121
In the world of blogs, the low-animal metaphor is used with even more vehemence than in traditional forms of media; particularly disturbing is the way
in which many bloggers extend the idea of the enemy from terrorists to all of
Islam. When the disease metaphor is invoked in the following examples, it is
applied not just to those suspected of terrorism but to the whole religion: “A
little bit of Islam is like a little bit of cancer;”122 “Islam, America’s cancer;”123
“Islam is the cancer, nukes are the answer;”124 “Like a cancer spreading over
the body, the beautiful ‘peaceful’ religion of Islam is spreading all over this
earth;”125 “Islam is a hideous, hairy-warted cancer.”126
The symbolism of serpent, vermin, and rodent is also invoked in many
voices from the blogosphere. The snake metaphor is very deliberately called
upon to necessitate extermination in this quotation: “Once the rattlesnake
has bitten your child and killed it, you are unlikely to allow it and its family
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nest to continue to exist. And the analogy is a perfect one because we have
the ability to exterminate Islam from the face of the Earth.”127 Other examples include:
Terrorism is only the poison the snake spits. The snake itself is the rise of
Islam as a force in the modern world.128
You can talk as sweet as you want to a snake but never turn your back on it.129
I believe that Britain has fed a snake at its bosom and has been bitten by
the snake.130
It will only be a matter of time before it becomes open season on Muslim
extremists around the world and we will be able to just exterminate you
like the rats that you are.131
It is time for Americans to unite—and for us to help root out every last
one of these vermin hiding within our country,132
Why don’t we expel all of the Muslim vermin currently infesting this great
country. 133
Drive the Islamist terrorist vermin into the sea.134
If folks simply shoot spit wads of lard at Islamic items, tomb stones, crescents, vermin pits (aka mosques), korans and other public islamic vermin symbols135
Shame about all the muslim vermin that have infested Britain.136
I really hope we exterminate these al-Qaida vermin as quickly as possible.
137
I fully agree with the comments about terrorists whatever their beliefs or
religion exterminate them.138
Who will be our Adolf and bring extinction to the Islamic beast?139
This startling call for “our Adolf” reinforces and makes explicit the link
between genocide and the public use of dehumanizing metaphor. While the
internet offers a forum for extremities of hate speech that most of us would
decry and distance ourselves from, the fact that these bloggers so consistently
employ metaphors identical to those we find in much more mainstream and
representative media such as newspapers is extremely telling.
Is it any wonder, given this consistency of metaphor, that we see photos
such as those from Abu Ghraib, which literalize the figurative language of
metaphor by treating humans as animals? Although the Red Cross estimates
that between 70 and 90 percent of the Abu Ghraib prisoners were innocent
and eventually released, while detained they endured treatment that made
their less-than-human status very clear, including being leashed and being ridden like animals.140 Hussein Mohssein Mata Al-Zayiadi, detainee No. 19446,
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one of the hooded prisoners shown in the infamous Abu Ghraib photographs,
told military investigators that he and other prisoners were forced to crawl on
their hands and knees with guards “sitting on our backs riding us like animals.”141 Amnesty International reports that Abu Ghraib detainee Nori gave
a sworn statement to military investigators on January 17, 2004, alleging that
“They treated us like animals, not humans. They kept doing this for a long
time. No one showed us mercy. Nothing but cursing and beating. After that
they left us for the next two days naked with no clothes, with no mattresses,
as if we were dogs.”142
It was not just prisoners at Abu Ghraib who were vulnerable to such treatment: in 2004, U.S. soldiers detained an elderly Iraqi woman in her seventies, placed a harness on her, made her crawl on all fours and rode her like a
donkey. British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s human rights envoy to Iraq, Ann
Clwyd, said she had investigated and believed the claims of the woman: “She
was held for about six weeks without charge,” Clwyd told the UK’s Evening
Standard newspaper. “During that time she was insulted and told she was a
donkey. A harness was put on her, and an American rode on her back.”143
Accusations of prisoner abuse also abound at the U.S. military base in
Guantánamo Bay, dubbed “Camp X-Ray” by military authorities, where “enemy combatants” are illegally held for years without trial. The term “enemy
combatant” has historically referred to the armed force of an enemy state. Enemy combatants in the present conflict, however, come from many nations,
wear no uniforms, and use unconventional weapons. Enemy combatants in
the war on terrorism are not defined by readily apparent criteria such as citizenship or military uniform; the power to name a citizen as an enemy combatant is therefore extraordinarily broad.144 But questions of how to define
combatants are only subsidiary questions in a much larger issue of the systemic
racism underpinning the war. As twenty-three-year-old Josh Middleton of the
82nd Airborne division bluntly observed after a four-month tour in Iraq, “A
lot of guys really supported the whole concept that if they don’t speak English
and they have darker skin, they’re not as human as us, so we can do what we
want.”145 “What we want,” when we perceive our enemy as less than human,
is to perform that inhumanity in ways both literal and symbolic. Thus prisoners at Guantánamo Bay are kept shackled and caged, as legal counsel and former captives affirm. Amnesty International confirms that prisoners are kept
inside their wire cages “sometimes up to 24 hours a day with little exercise
time out of their cells.”146 Former detainee Mamdouh Habib made his animal
status clear when he told human rights workers “I never see the sun, I never
have shower like a human being, I never have soap, I never have a cup to
drink, I never treated like a human being.”147 Fellow detainee Sayed Abbasin
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told Amnesty International after his release in 2003 that the Guantánamo
prison camp was “like a zoo.”148 British prisoner Tareq Dergoul said that he
was interrogated for up to ten hours at a time while chained like a dog to a
ring in the floor. In a sworn statement, he said he had been tied up “like a
beast” and beaten.149 Riasoth Ahmed, whose son Rhuhel was released after
being held for questioning for 790 days, echoes this consistent language of the
bestial when he observes: “They have treated my son like an animal. He has
been held in a cage in Cuba for two years without any charge and with no access to a lawyer.”150 Rhuhel Ahmed was one of the “Tipton Three,” the name
given to three young Muslim men from the English town of Tipton who were
arrested when visiting Pakistan and turned over to the American military on
suspicion of terrorist activities, accusations that have never been proven. The
Red Cross investigated their claims of torture and abuse at the hands of the
U.S. military and reported that “some of the abuses alleged by the detainees
would indeed constitute inhuman treatment. Inhuman treatment constitutes
a grave breach of the Third Geneva Convention and these are often also described as war crimes.”151 The American administration’s position that the
Guantánamo detainees should be denied the opportunity to challenge the
lawfulness of their detention led U.S. Supreme Court Justice David Souter to
point out that U.S. law at the Naval Base “even protect[s] the Cuban
iguana,”152 while detained humans are left with no protections.
Persuading prisoners that they are merely animals is a recognized interrogation strategy taught by those like Geoffrey D. Miller, a retired U.S. Army
Major General who commanded American detention facilities at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib. Miller told military intelligence officers that, to
control the interrogation, “You have to treat the prisoners like dogs”; “If you
treat them differently or if they believe that they’re any different than dogs,
you have effectively lost control of your interrogation from the very start.”153
To this end, at Abu Ghraib naked prisoners were forced to crawl like dogs
and, as part of the prison’s curriculum of “dog tricks,” were forced to bark like
dogs; “if we didn’t do that,” one prisoner reported, “they start hitting us hard
on our face and chest with no mercy.”154 When Military Working Dogs
(MWD) arrived at the Abu Ghraib site in November 2003, they were used
to threaten and bite detainees, both for interrogation purposes and for entertainment. Alex Danchev writes that
Two Army dog-handlers had a competition to see who could make a detainee
urinate or defecate on himself, if sufficiently terrorized by Marco and Duco,
dogs with better names than detainees [who were known only by numbers].
Other soldiers came to watch. Soon “doggy dances” were all the rage. These
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antics appear to have been regarded as just that by almost everyone who participated in them, or witnessed them, or heard about them, a sizeable constituency. Far from being concealed, they were a commonplace of prison conversation.155
Danchev notes that like the “ routine sexual humiliation” and “pervasive
nakedness” used to cow and demoralize prisoners, the use of dogs was “accepted practice” at Guantánamo Bay.156 In fact, the “dog tricks” were often
filmed and used as screen-savers on soldiers’ personal computers.157
The use of films and photos of such abuse as personal mementos highlights
another important element of dehumanization. When animal metaphors are
joined to metaphors of the hunt, we inevitably find the phenomenon of the
war trophy. Like the hunter’s trophy, the soldier’s war trophy testifies both to
the hunter’s prowess and the prey’s utter abjectness. It is not enough, within
the hunt metaphor, for the enemy to be an animal; he must also be a defeated
animal, stilled, stuffed, and mounted for the eternal glorification of the
hunter. The enemy’s weakness must be confirmed by the completeness of his
defeat, his subhuman nature confirmed by the extraordinary degree to which
he can be brought to heel.
Dangerously, this message is spreading to both combatants and noncombatants around the world. Columnist Bob Wing of the War Times describes a conversation between a friend and his Egyptian father, a man who
originally supported the war. Speaking of the notorious photograph showing
a female U.S. soldier holding a leashed Iraqi, White’s friend said, “What is
the message of that photo? It’s that the Iraqi is a dog.” “No,” said his father:
“The message is that he’s my dog.”158
War Trophies
For many years, soldiers in war have collected trophies of their military conquests, such as weapons, valuables, photos, ordnance, medals, and other
keepsakes. Soldiers in many previous wars have taken photos of dead enemy
soldiers and sent them home to family and friends with triumphant notes attached. Often these photos would be passed around from soldier to soldier
like playing cards.159 By soldiers’ accounts, the commemorative taking of
ears, fingers, even heads was not out of the ordinary in previous wars.160
Trophy hunting is likewise very much part of the war on terror. During the
initial invasion of Iraq, reports described soldiers taking rugs, crystal, copies
of the Koran, and other artifacts from Saddam’s palaces during the invasion
and selling them online on eBay.161 Journalists were also criticized for taking
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valuables, art, weapons, and artifacts from Iraq. When charged by U.S. customs agents for being in possession of stolen property, Jules Crittenden of the
Boston Herald stated in open letter to American journalists:
I understand and share the world’s concern about the disappearance of legitimate Iraqi national treasures that are in fact treasures of human civilization
[but these] are matters separate from the time-honored tradition among soldiers of bringing home reminders of some of the most intense experiences of
their lives.162
Especially troubling is the way many of these trophies do not simply memorialize but celebrate these “intense experiences.” Keeping mementos, from diaries to souvenirs, is a long-standing tradition, but the symbolism of the trophy explicitly glorifies the hunt and its triumphs. In one of the most
disturbingly literal versions of the hunt metaphor, there have been eyewitness accounts of American soldiers in Fallujah tying the dead bodies of resistance fighters to their tanks and driving around with their trophies like
hunters with an animal carcass tied to their hood.163 Such trophy-taking is
often more symbolic than literal, however, as in the case at some detention
camps where, according to the Pentagon, military leaders established a ritual
for departing personnel who “did a good job” by presenting them with a detainee’s hood.164 It’s difficult not to see this as more than a simple reminder
of the camp experience; it seems also to suggest a symbolic possession of the
enemy-Other, presented in the most abstracted, anonymous, interchangeable
form possible, the blank, black, obscuring mask. Now the departing soldier
can possess, pack up and take home the face of the enemy, in its most materially fabricated form. If it were not for the largely unchallenged domination
of the prevalent metaphors that, as they circulate and re-circulate through
the media, consistently diminish and de-humanize the enemy figuring him as
beast and prey, then such trophy-taking would surely be harder to justify by
the actors and observers of the practice. Since the headlines’ insistent
metaphors collectively figure the war as hunt, these trophy-taking activities
offer a grotesquely appropriate concretization of the hunt metaphor, in which
the “beasts” of the newspaper headlines translate the enemy body into a
source of grisly, but metaphorically apt, memento.
Soldiers are technically not allowed to bring back war trophies from Iraq,
only legally purchased souvenirs. Most types of war trophies, including body
parts, weapons, ordnance, and personal items are banned by military law.165
Souvenir photos of prisoners of war are also a violation of the Geneva Convention, which prohibits photographing detainees or mutilating or degrading
Rats in the Trap 89
dead bodies. However, despite this prohibition, extreme examples of war trophy collection are emerging into public awareness. At a Citizens’ Hearing on
the Legality of U.S. Actions in Iraq, various decorated soldiers gave accounts
of incidents contravening international law they witnessed in Iraq. One officer described a particularly gruesome incident: “According to Chanan
Suarez-Diaz, who also received a Purple Heart for his service in Iraq, the psyched up emotions among the troops resulted in U.S. soldiers taking ‘trophies’
of brain matter from Iraqis they killed and putting such in their refrigerators
on base.”166
Despite their contravention of the Geneva Convention, this kind of
trophy-taking has been largely sanitized by media and government. By referring to such acts as “prisoner abuse” rather than as war crimes, they are made
to seem less systemic, more the rogue activities of a few individuals acting on
their own initiative, or of a few understandably stressed soldiers letting off
steam by allowing “hazing” rituals to get out of hand.167 The widespread phenomenon of “trophy videos” emphasizes that trophy-taking, like the abuse
and degradation of detainees, is not a rare or marginalized activity. Attaching video cameras to their helmets during combat, many soldiers send video
footage back home, documenting scenes from the comic to the appalling and
horrific. Often set to a thrash metal soundtrack, hundreds of hours of such
footage is now posted on a range of internet sites; one soldier compared his
footage to a video game, saying that like a game “you’re stepped away from
reality . . . you’re seeing it through the camera lens.”168 Another made the explicit connection between such trophies and the trophies of the literal hunt,
saying that these videos made him feel proud of his work, “like a big game
hunter feels proud of his kills.”169
The trophy videos emerging from Iraq, notes Susan Sontag, represent an
important shift from previous wars, in which the photography of war was
chiefly “the province of photojournalists.”170 In contrast, new technologies
allow all soldiers to be photographers, capturing and circulating war images
at will. These records can be swapped individually, as old war snapshots used
to be, but they can also be sent digitally around the globe, viewed by other
military personnel and by civilians. Collectively, these images have come to
be called “War Porn” after the term coined by social theorist Jean Baudrillard
in an influential 2004 essay. Baudrillard argues that the video trophies emerging from Iraq, with their “garishly explicit images,” crude aesthetics, and low
production values, even share the look of much modern porn.171 Like “specialist” porn produced for and distributed to a niche market, Baudrillard suggests, the “posing of Iraqi inmates for those famous pictures in Abu Ghraib
prison,” which featured several female GIs in the role of dominatrixes over
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bound and naked prisoners, were taken with digital cameras and, like specialist porn, originally intended for private distribution.172
Mary Ann Tetreault echos Baudrillard’s equation of video war trophies
with pornography. “If,” she argues, “we define pornography as a record of the
violation of a subject’s physical and psychic integrity,” then we must understand images of torture, corpses, and brutal interrogation as similar to “stills
from snuff films, statements of the utter worthlessness of the prisoners and
the life-and-death power over them exercised by their captors.”173 The link
between war porn and sexual porn is disturbingly solidified by an internet site
claiming to “support the troops” by supplying sexual pornography in exchange for images of war porn submitted by American soldiers. The site,
eventually closed in 2006, was immensely popular, reporting 150,000 registered users, of whom 45,000 were American military personnel.174 It became
a showcase for horrifically violent images, including close-ups of Iraqi insurgents and civilians with their heads shattered or blown off, or with organs
spilling from gaping wounds. A popular game on the website involved guessing which indecipherably mangled body part was being displayed.175
Another kind of trophy can be detected in the images of men in American
military uniform raping Iraqi women that have been circulating on the web
for some time now. There is some dispute over whether the photos are real or
posed, but they have appeared on pornography websites advertising “Iraqi
babes.” Given that war and occupation often result in the rape and abuse of
women, the concern over the veracity of the photos is perhaps not as chilling
a question as what the photos symbolize and what life is like for women living under military occupation. A report published by the Iraqi National Association for Human Rights in 2005 found numerous cases of rape and assault
of female Iraqi detainees by soldiers. These violations will not end, writes
Haifa Zangana, so long as Iraq is occupied by forces enjoying “immunity from
prosecution under Iraqi law and as long as the occupation authorities continue to treat Iraqi citizens with racist contempt in order to feel better about
plundering the nation’s wealth and depriving its people of their most fundamental rights under international law and human rights conventions.”176
The violence and contempt denounced by Zangana is neither “exceptional nor hidden,” argues sociologist Sherene Razack. The trophy videos
that capture and endlessly replay this violence are not solely strategic; they
are not produced, Razack states, “in order to intimidate and humiliate the
enemy, as the American military claimed . . . but for the use of individual soldiers themselves, to be tacked up on the fridge door or sent home as souvenirs.”177 These souvenirs memorialize acts enabled by racism in the service
of conquest; they document potent narratives of power relations. Tétreault
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argues that the Abu Ghraib photos insist upon American global dominance
by punishing the inferior Oriental enemy: “With a few exceptions, the subjects of these photos are not corpses. They are living persons in the thrall of
powerful and sadistic captors. We see them terrified, abject, forced to perform
humiliating acts, and subjected to physical torture. Their images are not
harmless war souvenirs . . . they are evidence. They document the crimes as
well as the impunity with which they were committed.”178 Like another example of the pornography of violence, lynching photographs from the Southern U.S., the Abu Ghraib pictorial trophies clearly unfold a visual narrative
of power.179
As with much sexual pornography, it is difficult to separate issues of power
from the images we find in the pornography of war. The control of the scene,
its costumes and lighting, its postures and props belong to the producer of the
image, who stages and choreographs the scene that the lens will capture.
Paradoxically, war trophies of this sort are both artificial and authentic: they
stage only a certain part of the story for the camera, but they document a very
real abuse, and in that documentation, they intensify its reality. James
Harkin writes in The Guardian that, as with pornography, the producers of
war porn “heighten their sense of reality by videoing themselves in the act,
while its audience does the same by ogling the videos.”180
Sontag argues that these photo-trophies are “less objects to be saved than
messages to be disseminated.”181 What, then, is at the heart of these messages?
What narrative do they repeatedly circulate? For Beaudrillard, the message is
one of annihilation; through trophies like the Abu Ghraib photos, “the other
will be exterminated symbolically. One sees that the goal of the war is not to
kill or to win, but abolish the enemy.”182 This suggests how far our need to
eradicate extends: we need not only to exterminate the enemy but to immortalize and endlessly re-witness the symbolic scenes of that extermination. We
need to be able to create documents that testify to the enemy’s otherness and
abjection, and to that end we mount spectacles, as we mount trophies, of
dominance and humiliation. These spectacles tell us not simply a triumphant
story of our own superiority and prowess, but more chillingly, we rely on them
to tell us a consolatory story of survival. After all, these war trophies tell us a
narrative that echoes the big game hunter’s: a story of contact with the
hunter’s savage beast and survival of its menace. However uncivilized the images in the photographic war trophy, they tell an old, old story of a civilizing
mission; for Razack, the Abu Ghraib photos demonstrate what, in the name
of survival, “must be done to savages.”183 In this sense, these acts are performed in all our names, in the name of the entire, threatened West. It is not
only that we tacitly allow such acts to continue without calling for judgment
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that confirms, in Tétreault’s words, “we are all torturers now,”184 but that these
acts of trophy-taking symbolically express our society’s need to distance itself
from and annihilate the unknown, alien, threatening other. That this need
plays itself out so brutally on the bodies of our captives and so devastatingly
in the psyches of our soldiers is one more reason to critically examine and resist such narratives of dominance and destruction.
Notes
1. Kenneth Burke. Language as Symbolic Action: Essays on Life, Literature and
Method. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968: 3.
2. Hans Biedermann. Dictionary of Symbolism. New York City: Facts on File, 1992:
viii.
3. Hans Biedermann. Dictionary of Symbolism.
4. Arnold Whittick. Symbols, Signs and Their Meaning. Newton, MA: Charles T.
Branford Co., 1971: 4.
5. Cited in Arnold Whittick. Symbols, Signs and Their Meaning.
6. Arnold Whittick. Symbols, Signs and Their Meaning.
7. Hans Biedermann. Dictionary of Symbolism.
8. George Lakoff. “Metaphors of War.” In these Times. October 29, 2001. See
www.inthesetimes.com/issue/25/24/lakoff2524.html (June 28, 2007).
9. Toronto Sun, April 18, 2003.
10. Grand Rapid Press (Michigan), June 9, 2005.
11. Daily News (New York), July 8, 2005.
12. London Daily Telegraph, June 15, 2002.
13. The Star-Ledger (Newark, New Jersey), March 27, 2003.
14. Daily News (New York), July 20, 2005.
15. China Daily, December 15, 2003.
16. Grand Rapid Press (Michigan), October 31, 2005.
17. The York Dispatch (York, PA), March 11, 2003.
18. Deseret Morning News (Salt Lake City), May 29, 2004.
19. Florida Times-Union (Jacksonville, FL), December 18, 2003.
20. Lancaster New Era (Lancaster, PA), April 2, 2003.
21. Weekend Australian, September 9, 2006.
22. The Kansas City Star, June 23, 2004.
23. The Sun (London), September 23, 2005.
24. The Nation (Kenya), September 15, 2006.
25. Agence France Presse—English, October 15, 2004.
26. David Corn. “George Won’t Be Reading This: the President Prefers Spin to
News.” Los Angeles Weekly. October 23, 2003. See www.laweekly.com/news/news
/george-wont-be-reading-this/2295/ (June 28, 2007).
27. New York Post, July 3, 2004.
Rats in the Trap 93
28. Deutsche Presse-Agentur, May 13, 2007.
29. The Sun (England), December 30, 2006.
30. Western Daily Press, November 17, 2004.
31. Daily Post (Liverpool), April 15, 2003.
32. Sunday Mercury, April 6, 2003.
33. Australian, August 6, 2003.
34. The Toronto Star, May 8, 2005.
35. Pakistan Press, October 24, 2004.
36. New York Times, October 11, 2002.
37. Daily Star (UK), January 16, 2007.
38. Daily Star (UK), July 16, 2005.
39. Sunday Express (UK), February 6, 2005.
40. Pakistan Press, October 24, 2004.
41. The Herald (Glasgow), September 4, 2004.
42. The Times (London), July 24, 2004.
43. Daily Telegraph (London), April 19, 2004.
44. Daily Telegraph (Sydney, Australia), July 14, 2005.
45. The New Zealand Herald, September 12, 2002.
46. ONASA News Agency, November 22, 2003.
47. NY Daily News, July 8, 2005.
48. Hans Biedermann. Dictionary of Symbolism.
49. NY Post, May 25, 2002.
50. Daily News (New York), May 9, 2007.
51. St. Petersburg Times (Florida), December 15, 2003.
52. The Christchurch Press, December 16, 2003.
53. Irish News, June 7, 2005.
54. Yorkshire Evening Post, November 8, 2004.
55. The Australian, December 18, 2003.
56. See news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/newsnight/3045574.stm
57. E. W. H. Huntley. “United Kingdom: Desert Rats.” allstates-flag. December 6,
2002. See www.allstates-flag.com/fotw/flags/gb percent5Edesrt.html
58. E. W. H. Huntley. “United Kingdom: Desert Rats.”
59. Hans Biedermann. Dictionary of Symbolism.
60. C. Douglas Lummis. “The Terrorist as a New Human Type: You Are Charged
With Being Evil. Defend Yourself!” Z. January 19, 2004. See www.zmag.org/content
/showarticle .cfm?ItemID=4853 (June 28, 2007).
61. The Herald (Scotland) April 25, 2003.
62. The Times (London), January 31, 2006.
63. Skegness News, July 11, 2006.
64. Bath Chronicle, February 8, 2006.
65. Jose A Carillo. “English Plain and Simple.” Manila Times. May 27, 2003. See
www.manilatimes.net/national/2003/may/27/top_stories/20030527top13.html (June 28,
2007).
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66. New York Post, January 24, 2003.
67. New York Post, February 14, 2003.
68. New York Post, February 18, 2003.
69. New York Post, April 23, 2004.
70. New York Post, May 23, 2006.
71. Grand Rapid Press (Michigan), March 15, 2003.
72. Toronto Sun, April 4, 2003.
73. Sunday Express (UK), April 13, 2003.
74. Arnold Whittick. Symbols, Signs and Their Meaning.
75. Beryl Rowland. Animals with Human Faces. Knoxville, TN: University of
Tennessee Press.1973.
76. New York Post, December 2, 2001.
77. Financial Express, May 18, 2002.
78. London Daily Telegraph, June 15, 2002.
79. London Sunday Times, March 23, 2003.
80. The Weekend, Australian, April 5, 2003.
81. The Daily Telegraph (Sydney, Australia), April 16, 2003.
82. Birmingham Post, March 13, 2003.
83. Calgary Sun, July 17, 2005.
84. Your Dictionary. “Top Ten Word Lists of 2003.” December 26, 2003. See www
.yourdictionary.com/about/topten2003.html (June 28, 2007).
85. Libby Copeland. “Spider hole’s web of meanings.” Washington Post. December 18, 2003.
86. Libby Copeland. “Spider hole’s web of meanings.”
87. Cox News Service, December 30, 2003.
88. The Post and Courier (Charleston, SC), October 9, 2003.
89. The Advertiser, December 15, 2003.
90. The Independent (London), January 24, 2004.
91. Houston Chronicle, December 16, 2003.
92. Boston Herald, December 15, 2003.
93. Terril L. Shorb & Yvette A. Schnoeker-Shorb (eds). Least Loved Beasts of the
Really Wild West. Prescott, AZ: Native West Press, 2003.
94. The Oregonian (Portland, Oregon), December 29, 1998.
95. Sudbury Star, May 12, 2004.
96. St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri), November 8, 2005.
97. Tampa Tribune (Florida), August 28, 2002.
98. St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri), November 13, 2004.
99. The Herald (Glasgow), May 7, 2004,
100. The Australian, May 2, 2003.
101. Washington Post, November 13, 2004.
102. B. Raman. “Use a Cockroach to Catch a Cockroach.” South Asia Analysis
Group. September 19, 2001. See www.saag.org/papers4/paper316.html (June 28, 2007).
103. Toronto Star, June 22, 2003.
Rats in the Trap 95
104. Sudbury Star, May 12, 2004.
105. Toronto Star, November 26, 2006.
106. Times (London), November 11, 2006.
107. BBC Monitoring International Reports, January 4, 2004.
108. Turkish Daily News, November 21, 2003.
109. News of the World (England), August 13, 2006.
110. Irish Times, October 4, 2005.
111. National Post, July 23, 2003.
112. National Post, July 23, 2003.
113. Daily Herald, (Portland, Maine), September 16, 2001.
114. Australian, October 22, 2002.
115. UPI, January 20, 2005.
116. U.S. News and World Report, April 14, 2003.
117. Providence Journal-Bulletin (Rhode Island), April 16, 2003.
118. Hamilton Spectator (Ontario, Canada), July 16, 2004.
119. Agence France Presse—English, April 1, 2006.
120. New York Times, July 16, 2004.
121. Press Association (Central Command, Qatar), April 2, 2003.
122. JihadWatch. See www.jihadwatch.org/archives/016467.php
123. Hara M. Fard. “Islam, America’s Cancer.” Dhimmi Wits. May 17, 2007. See
upyourcult.blogspot.com/ (June1, 2007).
124. germaninamerica. “bomb islam.” Jihadwatch. December 9, 2006. See www
.jihadwatch.org/archives/014346.php (June 28, 2007).
125. Florian. “Islam: The Cancer of the Earth.” florians-insensitivity-training. February 7, 2007. See florians-insensitivity-training.blogspot.com/2007/02/islam-cancer
-of-earth.html (June 28, 2007).
126. Rastaman. “Muslims Show Their Love Of Children.” February 27, 2007. Islamanzi. See islamanazi.com (June 28, 2007).
127. Subsunk. “Untitled.” An Idiot’s Blog. May 9, 2007. See kbarrett.cotse.net/idiot
/index.php?title=feds_wonder_if_jihadis_nuke_us_who_do_we&more=1&c=1&tb=1
&pb=1 (June 28, 2007).
128. Sultan Knish. “Whatever You Do, Don’t Fight Back.” Sultanknish. February
28, 2007. See sultanknish.blogspot.com/index.html (June 28, 2007).
129. Ronin. “Blair, Pakistan PM to open conference on Islam.” Doctor Bulldog.
May 29, 2007. See doctorbulldog.wordpress.com (June 28, 2007).
130. Sleepycat. “Britain ‘is now biggest security threat to US’.” JihadWatch. August 26, 2006. See www.jihadwatch.org/archives/012914.php (June 28, 2007).
131. Latrell Washington. “Untitled.” Realm of the Sphinx. June 2, 2007. See realm
ofthesphinx.blogspot.com/ (June 28, 2007).
132. Patrick McGuinness. “Common Sense.” Freedoms Truth. March 27, 2007.
See freedomstruth.blogspot.com/index.html (June 28, 2007).
133. Darrin Hodges. “Muslim vermin seething.” Voice of the Shire. May 28, 2007.
See voiceoftheshire.blogspot.com/ (June 28, 2007).
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134. Conan. “Untitled.” Scotsman. June 4, 2007. See www.scotsman.com/?id=
869642007 (June 28, 2007).
135. Cfinstr. “End Islam.” Jihad Chat. February 6, 2007. See www.jihadchat.com
/index.php?showtopic=521&pid=2174&mode=threaded&start=—30k—(June 28,
2007).
136. Jester. “Untitled.” My Pet Jawa. October 30, 2005. See mypetjawa.mu.nu
/archives/129768.php (June 28, 2007).
137. Supercaffinated. “Untitled.” Storage Review. July 7, 2005. See forums.storage
review.net/index.php?showtopic=20229 (June 28, 2007).
138. Forresloon. “London Terrorist Bombings.” This is North Scotland Bulletin. July
10, 2005. See www.nepforums.co.uk/thisisnorthscotland/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=
17594&page =&view=&sb=5&o=&fpart=all&vc=1 (June 28, 2007).
139. The Liberty Papers. May 18. 2007. See www.thelibertypapers.org/2007/05/18
/explaining-the-reaction-to-ron-paul/ (June 28, 2007).
140. Andrew Buncombe and Justin Huggler. “Iraq: Abuse Crisis: Abu Ghraib: inmates raped, ridden like animals.” Independent (London), May 22, 2004.
141. Scott Higham and Joe Stephens. “New Details of Prison Abuse Emerge: Abu
Ghraib Detainees’ Statements Describe Sexual Humiliation and Savage Beatings.”
Washington Post. May 21, 2004.
142. Amnesty International. “Human dignity denied Torture and accountability in
the ‘war on terror.’” Amnesty International. October 27, 2004. See web.amnesty.org
/library/Index/ENGAMR511452004 (June 29, 2007).
143. Democracy Now. “Report: U.S. Treated Elderly Woman Like a Donkey.” Democracy Now. May 6th, 2004. See www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=04/05/06
/149239
144. “Detention of Enemy Combatants Act.” 109th CONGRESS 1st Session H.
R. 1076. March 3, 2005.
145. Leonard Doyle. “‘A dead Iraqi is just another dead Iraqi.’ You know, so
what?’” The Independent. July 12, 2007.
146. “Detention of Enemy Combatants Act.”
147. Cageprisoners. “Profile: Mamdouh Habib.” Cageprisoners. January 29, 2005. See
www.cageprisoners.com/articles.php?id=5011
148. Amnesty International. “Human dignity denied torture and accountability in
the ‘war on terror.’” op. cit.
149. Nigel Morris. “War on Terror: Guantánamo: I Was Tied up like a Beast and
Beaten.’” The Independent (London). August 4, 2004.
150. Robert Verkaik. “Joy and Despair: a Tale of Two Fathers.” The Independent
(London). March 10, 2004.
151. Vikram Dodd and Tania Branigan. “US Abuse Could Be War Crime.”
Guardian. August 5, 2004.
152. Dahlia Lithwick. “The Prisoners’ Dilemma.” Slate. April 20, 2004. See www
.slate.com/id/2099223/
153. Alex Danchev. “Like a Dog!” Humiliation and Shame in the War on Terror.”
Alternatives: Global, Local, Political. Volume 31, Issue 3, July 2006: 259–83.
Rats in the Trap 97
154. Alex Danchev. “Like a Dog!”
155. Alex Danchev. “Like a Dog!”
156. Alex Danchev. “Like a Dog!”
157. Alex Danchev. “Like a Dog!”
158. Bob Wing. “The Color of Abu Ghraib.” War Times. May 17, 2004. See www
.why-war.com/news/read.php?id=4270
159. Mary Ann Tétreault. ‘The Sexual Politics of Abu Ghraib: Hegemony, Spectacle, and the Global War on Terror.” NWSA Journal 18.3, 2006: 33–50. See muse
.jhu.edu/journals/nwsa _journal/v018/18.3tetreault.html
160. Tom Engelhardt. “War Porn.” Z. June 14, 2006. See www.zmag.org/content
/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=10429
161. Matt Smith. “Soldiers put Iraq ‘war trophies’ on eBay.” CNN. March 18,
2004. See www.cnn.com/2004/US/03/18/iraq.war.booty/
162. DeWayne Wickham. “Iraq war ‘souvenir’ stories reawaken guilt.” USA Today. April 28, 2004. See www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnist/wickham/2003
-04-28-wickham_x.htm
163. Dahr Jamail. “Trophy Hunting in Iraq.” AntiWar. December 5, 2004. See www
.antiwar.com/jamail/?articleid=4112
164. Eric Schmitt and Carolyn Marshall. “Before and After Abu Ghraib, a U.S.
Unit Abused Detainees.” New York Times. March 19, 2006.
165. Marine Corps News Service. “War Trophies.” About.com. August 20, 2003.
See usmilitary.about.com/cs/wars/a/wartrophies.htm
166. Chanan Suarez-Diaz. “Citizens’ Hearing Panel Declares Iraq War Illegal.”
wartribunal.org. February 2, 2007. See www.wartribunal.org/
167. Kurt Nimmo. “Torture Party: Limbaugh and the Babes of Abu Ghraib.”
CounterPunch. May 8–9, 2004. See www.counterpunch.org/nimmo05082004.html
168. Chris Shaw. “Don’t look now: U.S. soldiers’ ‘trophy videos’ of Iraq make uncomfortable viewing for the American government next to TV networks’ coverage.”
Guardian. August 4, 2006.
169. Chris Shaw. “Don’t look now.”
170. Cited in Tom Engelhardt. “War Porn.”
171. Jean Baudrillard. “War Porn.” International Journal of Baudrillard Studies. Volume 2, Number 1, January 2005.
172. Jean Baudrillard. “War Porn.”
173. Mary Ann Tétreault. ‘The Sexual Politics of Abu Ghraib.”
174. George Zornick. “The Porn of War.” The Nation. September 22, 2005. See
www .thenation.com/docprint.mhtml?i=20051010&s=the_porn_of_war>.
175. Ibid.
176. Haifa Zangana. “All Iraq Is Abu Ghraib.” Guardian. July 5, 2006.
177. Sherene Razack. “When Is Prisoner Abuse Racial Violence.” Z. May 24,
2004. See www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=5594
178. Mary Ann Tétreault. ‘The Sexual Politics of Abu Ghraib.”
179. Mary Ann Tétreault. ‘The Sexual Politics of Abu Ghraib.”
180. Haifa Zangana. “All Iraq Is Abu Ghraib.” Guardian. July 5, 2006.
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181.
182.
183.
184.
Cited in Tom Engelhardt. “War Porn.”
Jean Baudrillard. “War Porn.”
Sherene Razack.”When Is Prisoner Abuse Racial Violence.”
Mary Ann Tétreault. “The Sexual Politics of Abu Ghraib.”
C H A P T E R
F I V E
Infestation and Eradication:
Exterminationist Rhetoric
in Political Cartoons
Good cartoons . . . hit you primitively and emotionally. . . . A cartoon
cannot say, “on the other hand” and it cannot defend itself. It is a frontal
assault, a slam dunk, a cluster bomb.1
—Doug Marlette
Popular Culture and the War on Terror
Dehumanizing metaphors do not only circulate through explicitly political
texts such as government speeches and press releases or through media reporting. Just as animal metaphors tend to become more extreme when they enter
less regulated spheres such as internet blog sites, so negative stereotyping appears in some of its most vicious forms in popular culture. It’s important to examine these images both because they are so pervasive and because, by virtue
of the modes through which they reach us, they are often absorbed without any
of the filtering apparatus of critical thought that we might employ when faced
with texts that are more obviously political in nature. Because these images are
apparently transmitted so innocently through the vehicles of pop culture, they
come to seem natural, as if they are simply reflecting the world. Far from merely
showing reality, however, they actively create it through fostering a specific understanding of the world. Because they come to us through movies, television,
and other forms of popular entertainment, it’s easy to perceive these images as
being less motivated, less interested, and less ideological than they might seem
if they came to us from the mouths of pundits or politicians.
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Yet the distance between the worlds of politics and pop culture is often
not nearly as great as we might think. Jack Valenti, president of the Motion
Picture Association of America, acknowledged this when he said “Washington and Hollywood spring from the same DNA.”2 This close genetic relationship can be most clearly detected when we consider some of the many
Hollywood films that were produced in active cooperation of the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD).3 Films such as Death Before Dishonor, Black
Hawk Down, Executive Decision, Patriot Games, Navy Seals, Rules of Engagement, Iron Eagle and True Lies, all produced in partnership with the DoD and
showing American armed forces personnel killing Arabs and Muslims on a
huge scale, solidify Washington’s connection with Hollywood. While these
connections often go unrecognized and unexamined, Jack Shaheen, author
of the most comprehensive analysis of Arab representations in film and television, argues that “Politics and Hollywood images are linked. They reinforce
one another. Policy enforces mythical images; mythical images help enforce
policy.”4 The power of film is such that “in spite of the reality, in spite of the
material that we know to be true, we still embrace the mythology.”5 This
mythology is one we originally inherited from European Orientalists who
conjured images of the Arab as the perpetual Other; now it makes up “part
of our psyches,”6 and we regularly draw upon it in setting policies and establishing courses of action. For example, America’s entrance into war with Iraq
was made much easier, asserts Shaheen, because of the accumulation of images vilifying Arabs established over more than a century by huge numbers
of movies (nearly one quarter, Shaheen documents, of all movies produced
by Hollywood) and popular television shows like Fox’s 24 or Showtime’s
Sleeper Cell.
Video games are another source of violently negative imagery. One notable
example is Left Behind: Eternal Forces, in which players win by converting or
killing non-Christians. Making its advent just in time for Christmas 2006, the
game is based on a series of best-selling Christian novels, and pits players
against the Anti-Christ, whose minions includes characters with Muslimsounding names. Rev. Tim Simpson, a Presbyterian minister from Jacksonville, Florida, and president of the Christian Alliance for Progress, expressed his shock in an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle: “So, under
the Christmas tree this year for little Johnny is this allegedly Christian video
game teaching Johnny to hate and kill?”7 Other games rewarding players for
hunting down Arabs and Muslims include Microsoft’s Counter-Strike, released
in 2002 by the U.S. Army to help bolster its recruitment efforts; the game now
has more than 7.5 million users.8 Less mainstream are games produced by
white supremacist groups allowing players to assume the first-person-shooter
Infestation and Eradication 101
position as they hunt visible minorities in games such as Ethnic Cleansing: The
Game in which players, dressed as Skinheads or in KKK robes, roam the
streets and subways murdering “predatory sub-humans” and thereby “saving”
the white world.9
Some of the strongest images and highest levels of violence arise from hybrid forms of pop culture. Movies based on first-person-shooter games such as
Alone in the Dark (2005) and House of the Dead (2003) blend the genres of
action movie and video game, escalating the death count far beyond that
usually found in Hollywood action thrillers. While often in these films the
enemy is literally unhuman, such as zombies or vampires, one movie hybrid
is worth examination for its radical dehumanization of a human, highly
racialized enemy. In Zack Snyder’s 300 (2007), a film based on Frank Miller’s
1998 comic book of the same name, we find a powerful embodiment of the
“clash of civilizations” paradigm that pits heroic, fair-skinned Spartans
against dark-skinned, marauding Persians, their indiscriminate and undifferentiated nature symbolized by the identical masks worn by their advancing
hordes. Computer graphics allow individual images to be multiplied and expanded in ways that were previously impossible; however, 300 tellingly uses
this technology not to individuate the dark-skinned masses, but to endlessly
re-duplicate them as interchangeable; they are as indistinguishable in their
long, kinky black hair and crazed, charcoal-rimmed eyes as they are in their
identical masks.
In his indictment of 300, New York artist John Powers expresses outrage over
the “septic timing” of the film’s release, “a brand of propaganda [he] had imagined was a thing of the past. 300 would make Leni Riefenstahl blush.”10 A film
propagandistic in both message and timing, Powers argues that 300 promotes a
vision glorifying total war against an inhuman enemy, and it does so at a social
moment when critical questions about the Iraq war are arising. The film answers
such questions with a ringing endorsement of aggressive militancy, telling its audience unambiguously to “hate and destroy its inhuman enemy.”11 In a film in
which good and evil are separated by race, Powers says, fear is stoked by racist
imagery, and the annihilation of the “undifferentiated dark-skinned horde” is
lavishly celebrated. The consistency of this message makes it the perfect cure for
“a fearful America,” and panders to young men and women of fighting age who
can be reassured by and enlisted into this vision of triumphant militancy destroying the barbaric threat to civilization. In this message we find a “pornographic vision of power and perfection” that demonstrates “only contempt” for
the imperfect Other, and justifies the Other’s extermination.12
Through these kinds of representations, the transmission of the hostile
image of the Middle Eastern male as rabid, barbaric, and innately violent has
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become so pervasive that, paradoxically, it has become invisible. Widely rebroadcast movies like True Lies reinforce this image and are televised so often that their catalogue of images have now become “part of our visual heritage.”13 We are so saturated in these images from childhood on that we no
longer really see them; we certainly don’t object to them the way we would
if such a coherent body of negative stereotypes were still being created of
Blacks, Jews, or Hispanics.
But, we may say in response, the images being so repeatedly transmitted
though popular culture aren’t unfair or accidental; they do reflect the reality
that we see so often on the nightly news, in which screaming, angry Arabs
appear looking just like the ones we see over and over on TV and movie
screens. And yet this commonsense equation, say critics like Shaheen, Said,
and Laurence Michalak14, overlooks some important points. The first is the
selectivity of the images emerging from news broadcasting; by definition, the
news documents unusual and hence newsworthy events, events with enough
inherent drama to catch and hold an audience. The second is the suppression of diversity in media and broadcasting; only very consistent depictions
tend to be shown. We often see scenes of crowds of Muslims prostrated in
prayer at a Mosque, for example, an image which obscures the fact that there
are over 20 million Arab Christians in the Middle East living alongside Muslims, and that much of Arabic society is actually quite secular.15 Third, there
is a tendency to generalize from relatively small groups of people to all others who share the same race or ethnicity. Racism and Islamophobia drive us
to represent the actions of the nineteen 9/11 terrorist as a reflecting the desires and actions of the 1.3 billion people who make up the Arab world, effortlessly conflating individuals with their entire race or religion. We don’t
do this with those who look more like us: for example, we don’t claim that
the actions of Ku Klux Klan members who are Christian represent all of
Christianity.16 When Timothy McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City federal
building his race, religion, and ethnicity were not highlighted by news reports of the bombing or portrayed as central to his motivations. In fact, the
media and government initially attributed the bombing to Middle Eastern
terrorists. CBC’s Connie Chung reported that a U.S. government source
“told CBS news that [the bombing] has Middle East terrorism written all over
it.”17 The Department of Defense offered to provide local investigators with
Arabic speakers to help in the investigation.”18 Over two hundred incidents
of bias against the Muslim community followed in the next few days, including attacks on private homes and mosques.19 The hypocrisy of such a response was clear to members of the American Islamic community. Enver Masud wrote in an on-line column that media reports rarely identify the religion
Infestation and Eradication 103
of leading figures or organization in any news except when that leader is
Muslim. “But when McVeigh was caught,” writes Masud, “and alleged to be
the bomber, there was no mention of Christianity. In the case of Muslims,
guilt by association casts blame on the billion or so Muslims worldwide. In
the case of Christians, the blame was narrowed, and rightly so, to McVeigh
and his accomplices.”20 Such assumptions about guilt and causality intersect
with and arise from the derogatory images that regularly re-circulate through
our popular culture, reaching massive audiences, and continually inducting
new generations into the frames of these old, enduring characterizations.
Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard have provocatively argued in The Hollywood
War Machine that this is part of a larger, more complicated problem informing changing American political attitudes. They observe that U.S. foreign
policy has been moving in the direction of an ever-broadening imperial vision of global domination, and that this vision is being supported and furthered by the messages of popular media. Quoting neo-conservative writer
Robert Kaplan’s assertion that America’s “prize” for winning the Cold War is
that “we and nobody else will write the terms for international society,” they comment that it “would be difficult to find a bolder contemporary reaffirmation
of Manifest Destiny.”21 For Boggs and Pollard, one of the key mechanisms for
endorsing this brand of American policy is found in popular culture, which
acts as a kind of legitimation-machine for American dominance or hegemony. All power structures require cultural supports as well as ideological and
political supports, they suggest, and the workings of popular culture tend to
serve the “imperatives of empire” by making a “bloated war economy,” increasing numbers of armed interventions in other countries, and increased
American expansionism seem natural, routine, inevitable, and desirable.22
Increased government, military, and corporate powers, argue Boggs and Pollard, bring with them things like more refined weapons and increased powers of surveillance, but while these things may be indispensable to the imperial project, the one thing they cannot furnish by themselves is the necessary
legitimation, that is, the ability to endorse and justify this project in the public mind. That task, they suggest, is “the function of media culture.”23 In film,
television, video games, political cartoons, comics and music we find both
the opportunity to creatively re-examine old, familiar wartime tropes, and
powerful ways to reinvest ourselves in these tropes.
The power of the image of the Arab in popular culture lies in its consistency and reiteration. The repetition of negative stereotypes over a century
of Hollywood film constitutes a systematic cultural education of viewers; the
narrowness and repetitiveness of Hollywood images add up, Shaheen argues,
to a “systemic, pervasive, and unapologetic degradation of a people.”24 From
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the release of Imar the Servitor in 1914 to 2000’s Gladiator, distorted stereotypes create a “synergy of images” equating “Arabs from Syria to the Sudan
with quintessential evil.”25 Collectively, these stereotypes have changed surprisingly little over time; it is their sheer durability across popular culture
that has given them such a noteworthy cumulative force. The “Screen Arab”
is, says Shaheen, exactly “what he has always been”—different, threatening,
the cultural Other.26 In 1937, the American heroine of Hollywood’s The
Sheik Steps Out says that Arabs “all look alike to me,” a sentiment echoed in
1968’s Commando, in which the hero admits “All Arabs look alike to me”
and again in 1986’s Hostage, in which the U.S. ambassador concedes “I can’t
tell one [Arab] from another . . . they all look the same to me.”27 In Hollywood movies, says Shaheen wryly, they certainly do. Although these representations are fictional, they require our attention because of the way Hollywood has become, as William Greider argues, “the authoritarian creator of
commonly shared attitudes.”28 The persistence of defamatory stereotypes
means that such representations can be sustained across generations. As future directors grow up immersed in these stereotypes, they are unconsciously
recycled into the productions of the next generation. Boggs and Pollack
agree that the repetition of such images solidifies their power: “The repetitive fantasies, illusions, myths, images, and story lines of Hollywood movies
can be expected to influence mass audiences in predictable ways.”29 These
tactics enlist us into prescribed discourses of a narrowly defined patriotism in
subtle, effective, often unconscious ways.
Pop Culture and Dissent
While some forms of pop culture, such as folk music, documentary, or alternative film have associations with traditions of dissent and provocation, in
times of war tremendous pressures can be brought to bear to limit, control, or
marginalize that dissent. The possibilities for different kinds of patriotism are
often narrowed or eliminated. While there may be more than one way to be
a good citizen, only certain versions of citizenship are endorsed. In wartime,
these representations tend to be dichotomized as simple, binary oppositions:
one is either Alladin’s Jafar or Rambo, terrorist or patriot, weasel or hawk.
This binarism is exemplified in the “Deck of Weasels” produced by
NewsMax.com, a deck of playing cards “depicting the 59 worst leaders and
celebrities who opposed America and were key members of the ‘The United
Nations of Weasels.”’30 The deck is based on the popular “Deck of Death”
playing cards given by the Pentagon to U.S. soldiers, featuring the faces of
“Iraqi’s Most Wanted” enemies; it shows the faces of critics or questioners of
Infestation and Eradication 105
the war, labeled “enemies of America,” wearing “the beret of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard”—now dubbed “Saddam’s Weasel Brigade.”31 The
conservative website that sells the cards promises that we’ll “laugh out loud
looking at the faces of the world’s greatest weasels” and that the deck is both
“relevant and useful.”32
The “Deck of Weasels” is particularly relevant and useful in illustrating
how even those exercising democratic rights of expression can be attacked
with dehumanizing animal metaphors if they are seen as too closely associated
with the enemy Other. It’s as if our humanity is such a fragile or contested
thing that it must constantly be protected by distancing itself from those we
brand as other. If we believed our own humanity to be unassailable, why
would we be so quick to diminish that of the people who pose uncomfortable
questions about the wisdom or morality of our actions? The “Deck of Weasels”
shows how readily our contempt for the enemy Other can be broadened and
generalized, narrowing ever further those we allow into our human camp.
Contempt joins with commerce in the selling of pop culture artifacts. In
America, argues Heather Havrilesky, we both attack and grieve “by buying
stuff”; we fuel our search for “revenge and healing through retail.”33 Commodified contempt has a durable shelf life: in the first Gulf War anti-Arab
merchandise proliferated, including bumper stickers, T-shirts, pins and
posters. A popular poster depicted a Bedouin on a camel in the cross-hairs of
a rifle, atop the slogan “I’d fly 10,000 miles to smoke a camel.”34 Currently
available is Osama toilet paper (“Help wipe out terrorism!”), Osama “Pin”
Laden voodoo dolls, and Osama bin Laden golf balls.35 Websites offer a range
of T-shirts and giftware showing all-American boy Calvin, from the comic
strip Calvin and Hobbes, peeing on the word “terrorists,” on a map of Iraq and
on the Islamic insignia of the star and crescent.36
One of the most popular and chilling lines of merchandise plays on the
idea of nuclear annihilation, turning it into a visual joke suitable for T-shirts,
housewares, and postcards. The joke celebrates the possibility of replacing an
entire nation of human beings with an annihilated landscape. The central image is a map of Iraq or Afghanistan, its recognizable outline all that remains;
the nation itself has been utterly excised. One such image shows a parking
grid marked on the site of where Afghanistan used to be, with the tag line “Future site of the ‘world’s largest parking lot.’” Another shows a picture of a huge
mushroom cloud with the caption “CNN live over Afghanistan.” Variants
show depictions of “Lake Afghanistan” and “Lake Iraq,”37 with the country’s
outline on the map blanked out with ominous black. Another Lake Iraq cartoon features the tag line “Bush’s final solution.” For those who didn’t get the
joke, a blogger spelled out the message: “I saw a bumper sticker a while back
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that said “Say Yes to Lake Afghanistan.” I’ll say yes to Lake Afghanistan and
Lake Iraq. Just drop a couple of those small nuclear bombs they tested earlier
this week and the war is over. No need to get American troops killed.”38 Apparel and household products featuring Lake Iraq emblazoned on them are
readily available for sale online: shirts come in six styles from raglan-sleeves
to hooded sweatshirts; there are two styles of coffee mugs plus a beer stein; also
available are kitchen aprons, baseball caps, magnets, stickers, postcards and
journals ranging in price from $3 to $30.39
Political Cartoons and the War on Terror
Editorial cartoons offer one of the most interesting examples of the way negative images permeate our consciousness. These cartoons are intriguingly situated at the intersection of popular and political culture, speaking irrevocably of both, and comprising a hybrid of the two. Timely and topical, they are
meant to elaborate and comment upon current events, and usually articulate
a specific political message from an ideological perspective. At the same
time, they are allied to other graphic forms, like newspaper comics or “funny
pages,” and they draw upon some of the same visual codes and shorthand
techniques. Like satire and stand-up comedy, they often bring together the
strange bedfellows of humor and outrage. Like newspaper headlines, they also
reach a wider audience than full-text news articles do; they are the most
widely read feature of the editorial section.40
Lucy Shelton Caswell observes that editorial cartoons have a complex
function; they both reflect and mould the opinions of their readers. While
good cartoonists may be “driven by a sense of moral duty” to support what
they believe to be right or oppose what they believe to be wrong, they must
also not irrevocably alienate newspaper management or readers.41 In this way,
although North American journalistic tradition treats editorial cartoons not
as mere illustrations but as persuasive communications with the rhetorical
force of editorials or op-ed columns, they are also the product of the “seemingly incongruous partnership of capitalism and freedom of expression.”42 Editorial cartoons are, therefore, complex in their workings and effects. Michael
DeSousa and Martin J. Medhunt suggest that the cartoon has a tri-partite role
as a “culture-creating, culture-maintaining, culture-identifying artifact.”43
While the cartoonist traditionally has a certain license to forcefully articulate
his or her political views, views which, as Virginia Bouvier observes, “reflect
and contribute to” the formation of political attitudes,44 the effectiveness of
the cartoon is limited by readers’ knowledge of the issues and contexts. This
means that the cartoonist “must gauge the community’s familiarity with the
Infestation and Eradication 107
topic of the day and choose images to express her or his opinion succinctly
and appropriately.”45 The economy of the cartoon form ensures that the artist
has a limited space in which to make his or her point; while, as several scholars have noted, this intensifies the immediate impact of the cartoon,46 it also
limits the cartoonists’ control of the message, since it is the reader who must
decode the cartoon’s visual metaphors within an economical, sometimes cryptic, frame. Elizabeth El Refaie points out that, for both readers and scholars of
cartoons, their “metaphors must always be studied within their socio-political
context.”47 While a cartoon’s visual metaphors are perhaps its most powerful
strategies,48 they are also its most volatile. Although early theorists of cognitive metaphor like Lakoff and Johnston postulated that metaphors are influenced by our physical experience as infants and are therefore universal to all
humans, others building on their work have since argued for a greater specificity of interpretation. Metaphor’s connection to thought, suggest recent
scholars, cannot be considered as entirely universal but must be examined
within specific socio-political contexts, which means that readers are likely to
bring “their own experiences and assumptions” to the process of interpreting
visual metaphors.”49 This individuality of interpretation, however, must be
balanced with the recognition that there are dominant tropes which are
broadly shared across a given community. While an idiosyncratic interpretation of an image may still exist, or be facilitated by a cartoonist (such as the
snake being represented as benign, as it might be for botanists or owners of pet
reptiles), shared, long-standing, communal associations of the snake as something evil, deceptive and deadly will inevitably dominate any reading of the
metaphor.
Perhaps it is the complexities of these broader questions of interpretation,
added to the complexities concerning the balance of responsibility with traditions of provocation in editorializing, that have led to one of the most
heated public debates to emerge during the war on terror.
Cartoons and Crisis
In 2005, a controversy costing the lives of at least fifty people50 occurred
when the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten published “The Face of Mohammed,” twelve cartoons representing Allah and his prophet Muhammed,
along with an explanatory text from the newspaper’s culture editor. The text
stated that special consideration for Muslims’ religious feelings is incompatible with contemporary democracy: in which anyone should “be ready to put
up with insults, mockery and ridicule.”51 These cartoons offended against the
Islamic tradition explicitly prohibiting depictions of Allah or Muhammad;
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one drew Mohammed as a saber-wielding terrorist accompanied by women in
burqas, another showed him with a lit bomb bearing the Islamic creed in his
turban.
Reaction from Danish Muslim organizations was immediate. Many Muslim organizations and Imams expressed outrage and demanded an apology,
while Jyllands-Posten defended its right to freedom of speech. An organization of ambassadors from Muslim countries attempted to meet with Danish
Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen but was refused.52 The prime minister, head of a center-Right minority coalition dependent for its survival on
support from an anti-foreigner party, called the cartoons a “necessary provocation.”53 Protests exploded across the Middle East and Asia as the cartoons
were reprinted around the world. In Lebanon, a demonstrator was killed after jumping from a third-floor window of the Danish embassy after it was set
on fire. Hundreds of Muslims burned Danish flags, and strikes were called
from Gaza to Indonesia to Nigeria. When Italian Reforms Minister Roberto
Calderoli wore a T-shirt displaying one of the controversial cartoons on
state TV, protests erupted in the streets.54 Protesters organized boycotts of
Danish products that may have reduced exports by 15.5 percent, costing
about 134 million euros or 180 million U.S. dollars.55 European countries
evacuated the staffs of embassies and non-governmental organizations while
Muslim countries withdrew ambassadors. In Turkey, an Italian priest was
gunned down by a high school student who was enraged by the cartoons.
According to The Independent, 150 people were killed in five days of violence between Nigerian Christians and Muslims, sparked by protests over
the Danish cartoons.56
Jyllands-Posten culture editor Flemming Rose apologized for the offense
caused by the cartoons, but not for his decision to publish them.57 The cartoonist who drew the “bomb in turban” picture of Mohammed insisted that
the popular Muslim interpretation of the cartoon is incorrect; he claimed that
The general impression among Muslims is that it is about Islam as a whole. It
is not. It is about certain fundamentalist aspects that of course are not shared
by everyone. But the fuel for the terrorists’ acts stem from interpretations of Islam . . . if part of a religion develops in a totalitarian and aggressive direction,
then I think you have to protest. We did so under the other ’isms.58
The cartoon incident became the centerpiece of a debate on censorship
and freedom of speech. Muslim scholars situate the cartoon controversy
within the current climate of ethnic and religious tension in Europe, underlying such events as the murder of film director Theo van Gogh and the 2005
Paris riots. Cartoonist Khalil Bendib states,
Infestation and Eradication 109
It is generally accepted, as taught in Journalism 101, that the concept of freedom of expression in a democratic society must always be balanced by the noless-important notion of social responsibility. Even in the name of free speech,
yelling “fire” in a crowded theater is considered reprehensible, as should be
yelling contempt in a crowded mosque.59
The central question articulated by scholar Reza Aslan concerns the usefulness of publishing the cartoons and the justification of free speech if the image is deliberately meant to be provocative:
In the minds of many Muslims in Europe, the cartoons were intentionally inflammatory, published to further humiliate an ethnic and religious minority
that has been socially and economically repressed for decades. Indeed, it seems
as though the cartoons were deliberately meant to provoke precisely the reaction they did.60
Aslan goes on to point out that while the press is free to satirize, some of the
Jyllands-Posten cartoons deliberately advance noxious stereotypes of Muslims
as terrorists. Freedom must be balanced with civic responsibility, especially
when extremists on both sides employ dangerous rhetoric based on the “clash
of civilizations” paradigm. Many governments in the Middle East, observes
Aslan, are eager to demonstrate the hostility of the West to the East in order
to procure support from their own people. Unfortunately, the violent protests
surrounding the cartoons risk confirming these dichotomies and offering
more fodder to those who wish Muslims to be seen as incompatible with “European values and culture.”61 Examining the marginalization experienced by
European Muslim communities, which feeds the destructive behavior and
isolationism that in turn reinforces European attitudes about Islam, Aslan indicts European xenophobia as the starting point of this dangerous cycle:
And that is why as a Muslim American I am enraged by the publication of
these cartoons. Not because they offend my prophet or my religion, but because they fly in the face of the tireless efforts of so many civic and religious
leaders both Muslim and non-Muslim to promote unity and assimilation rather
than hatred and discord; because they play into the hands of those who preach
extremism; because they are fodder for the clash-of-civilizations mentality that
pits East against West. For all of that I blame Jyllands-Posten. We in the West
want Muslim leaders to condemn the racial and religious prejudices that are so
widespread in the Muslim world.62
Bendib points out that while violent Muslim reaction to the cartoons works
to reconfirm crude stereotypes, the xenophobic European press adds fuel to
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the fire. The occupations of Afghanistan, Iraq, and Palestine, coupled with
the imagery found in the cartoons confirms both Muslim fears that the West
is contemptuous of their beliefs and their suspicion that denigration and humiliation are still standard features of Western imperialism. Bendib accuses
Western media and governments of having double standards when it comes
to offending Christian and Jewish versus Islamic sensibilities:
Take, for example, the impressive strides made in Europe to protect against
anti-Semitism, to the point that it is now against the law in some European
countries to publish or publicly express any denial or downplay the horrors of
the holocaust. Why should the same high standards of sensitivity and respect
not apply to Muslims, who are at least equally represented as Jews in Europe?
When you study the offensive Danish cartoons, it’s almost as if old Third
Reich-era anti-Semitic cartoons have been simply dusted off and recycled, using a Muslim name instead of Jewish ones.63
As’ad Abu Khalil maintains that the Danish cartoons are primarily offensive
in their linking of Islam to terrorism. He does not believe that the cartoonists were ignorant of what they were doing.64 Tariq Ali similarly claims that
the Jyllands-Posten cartoons were meant to provoke rather than engage in
quality debate, and points to the newspaper’s earlier decision in 2003 not to
print a cartoon caricature of Jesus.65 Ali calls the cartoon depicting Mohammed with a bomb in his turban a “crude racist stereotype. The implication is that every Muslim is a potential terrorist. This is the sort of nonsense
that leads to Islamophobia.”66 These kinds of “crude racist stereotypes” find
a familiar expression in the animal metaphors that are frequent features of
editorial cartoons.
Just as there is a persuasive body of work analyzing the dangerous effects
of the dehumanizing imagery employed in wars in the first half of the twentieth century, scholarly analysis demonstrates that these images have been
frequently mobilized in the Gulf conflicts. In 1996, Artz and Pollack examined how Saddam Hussein was depicted in political cartoons in the period
leading up to the 1991 Gulf War. Grouping the cartoons into two clear categories, Hussein as a danger and Hussein as marginalized and barbaric, they
argued that “the laughter, sarcasm and anger directed at Hussein through
these cartoons “helped mobilize an American public to tolerate the killing of
over 100,000 people in Iraq” and that, in conjunction with the media’s
“video game” portrayal of the war, these “images helped dehumanize the enemy.”67 In 1998, J. L. Conners argued that portrayals of Hussein as dehumanized, criminal, or aggressor reflected and furthered “Bush administration
rhetoric labeling him as a threat that the United States needed to control.”68
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These images intensified in the aftermath of 9/11. Examining editorial
cartoons between September 11, 2001, and October 8, 2001 (shortly before
the invasion of Afghanistan), William Hart and Fran Hassencahl found that
91 percent used Keen’s categories of dehumanization to portray the enemy as
animal and as aggressor. Echoing Murray Edelman’s caution that metaphors
may dangerously over-simplify complicated issues, Hart and Hassencahl argue that in order to better “understand the motives and future actions of
Osama bin Laden and the al Qaeda, we may find value in not accepting too
quickly over-simplifying metaphor.”69
Cartoons and Animal Metaphors
The extent of our symbolic coding is evident in oppositional pairings such as
the eagle and the vulture. Each of these birds is so closely identified with
their respective qualities of nobility, fierceness, and protectiveness on the
one hand and with rapacity, sinister appetite, and sly, scavenging greed on
the other that it is hard to recall that these characteristics are not natural but
assigned. An eagle looks after its young no more assiduously than a vulture
does, while a vulture is no more greedy in tearing at its food than an eagle is.
While both birds act naturally, their behavior is interpreted culturally. The
eagle becomes so much a symbol of qualities like courage and integrity that,
when the U.S. is pictured as an eagle in a political cartoon, it is hard to divorce the symbol from its associations, even if the cartoon is intended to be
critical of some aspect of American policy or activity. As Stanley Fish points
out, while we may interpret certain aspects of a text individually, the scope
of that interpretation always occurs within an “interpretive community” that
establishes the parameters for interpretation. This explains why, within a
community made up of many individual readers, certain interpretations will
dominate.70 Depending on the interpretive community an individual reader
belongs to, then, the understanding of a political cartoon might vary greatly:
a cartoon questioning some aspect of the war might be read as supporting it,
or vice versa. Almost inevitably, within the American interpretive community the eagle will connote strong, positive qualities, and these qualities will
structurally reinforce their perceived opposites when the enemy is pictured as
an eagle’s symbolic inferior. There is a powerful and immediate emotional
impact created by such juxtapositions, as we see in a cartoon by Jeff Parker
showing a proud eagle, clad in a stars-and-stripes breast plate, swiftly descending, with powerful wings outspread, towards the shifty, hunched vulture
labeled “Terrorism.”71 The complications of interpretation can be seen in another cartoon by Steve Breen and from the San Diego Union Tribune,72 which
shows a large, imposing-looking eagle seated upon a stool; the stool’s relative
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size reinforces the bird’s impressiveness largeness. With furrowed brow and
intent expression, the eagle sharpens its talons with a giant file; motion-lines
drawn around the filed talons visually confirm the deadly sharpness of their
glinting points. Isolated from surrounding text or clues as to the cartoonist’s
own political views, this image could be interpreted as endorsing or criticizing American use of deadly force; the potent symbolic qualities metaphorically associated with the eagle, however, make a critical reading of the cartoon far less likely to dominate.
A similar question of iconography and interpretation circulates around
the enemy-as-snake metaphor. In one popular variant of this metaphor, the
single snake appears as progenitor of a horde of serpentine spawn. In Cox and
Forkum’s 2006 cartoon, for example, a rearing cobra labeled “Islamic Republic of Iran” assures us, through fanged and forked-tongued mouth, “Don’t
worry. My babies will be harmless,” while curled protectively around a pile of
eggs marked with the symbol of radioactivity.73 In Deng Coy Miel’s 2005 cartoon entitled “Terrorism as a Snake-Hydra,”74 (see figure 5.1) a dead, decap-
Figure 5.1. Deng Coy Miel. “Terrorism as a Snake-hydra.” The Straits Times (Singapore). November 27, 2005.
Infestation and Eradication 113
itated snake labeled “Terrorism” gives posthumous birth to a grotesque brood
of vipers that stream from the neck of its gaping, headless body. The same
spawn trope is critically called up in Mike Lester’s cartoon “Spawn,”75 in
which a clearly very dead terrorist lies on the ground, while an intelligence
officer in a suit labeled “National Intelligence Estimate” brandishes a report
saying “Killing Terrorists Spawns More Terrorists.” He warns the armed U.S.
soldier standing over the corpse, “STAND BACK!! He’s about to spawn.”
Lester’s cartoon is overtly satiric: the corpse is so clearly, like Monty Python’s
famous parrot, an ex-enemy that the notion of its spawning is ludicrous. Intention, however, does not always govern interpretation. Even here, the
word “spawn” works in complex ways, calling up deeply entrenched symbolisms of the monstrous and reptilian; while the cartoon sets out to debunk
such charged language, it is also part of the larger discursive universe of cartoons in which such language works immediately and potently on the level
of anxiety and paranoia. As viewers, we may become entangled in familiar
symbolism to the extent that we cannot completely distance ourselves from
it. Dennis Mumby and Carole Spitzack call this “metaphoric entrapment.” In
metaphoric entrapment, a concept is understood so thoroughly and consistently in terms of a particular metaphor that it doesn’t appear to make sense
in any other terms. Our thinking about something (the war, the enemy) “becomes so tied up with a particular metaphoric structure that alternative ways
of viewing the concept are obscured, or appear to make less sense.”76
This is evident in cartoons depicting Arab news outlet Al Jazeera as a snake
(see figure 5.2).77 In Sandy Huffaker’s cartoon, Al Jazeera is drawn as a hypnotic
cobra, lightning-bolts streaming from its demonic-looking eyes and a snakecharmer’s pipe in its mouth, as a bearded Muslim, eyes glazed, stares blankly
ahead murmuring “yes, master.” This image is a particularly useful example of
metaphoric entanglement: although the station has gained a reputation among
media analysts for its high quality journalism and for its unusually independent
voice in a region where many news media are government-controlled, it is caricatured as a serpent hypnotizing its hapless viewer into submission. Because,
within this metaphoric entanglement, we can only understand Al Jazeera as
dangerous and reptilian, we can only see it as negative, a predisposition evident
in the fact that a recent poll found that 53 percent of Americans opposed the
launch of the channel and two-thirds of Americans thought the U.S. government should not allow it entry to the U.S. market.78 The extent of this distrust
is evident in the fact that its offices in Afghanistan and Iraq were bombed in the
early days of the war, and reports have suggested that President Bush considered
bombing Al Jazeera’s headquarters in Doha, stopped only by the dissent voiced
by Britain’s Tony Blair.79 The consequences of such metaphoric entanglement,
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Figure 5.2.
Sandy Huffaker. “Al Jazeera.” Cagle Cartoons. March 27, 2003.
then, can clearly be serious, echoing Murray Edelman’s caution that we must be
careful of our metaphors because they often permit us to confidently inhabit
over-simplified worlds in which “the causes are simple and neat and the remedies are apparent.”80
Like the Al Jazeera cartoon, many editorial cartoons echo the animal, hunt,
and disease metaphors found in other media, and often work towards similar re-
Infestation and Eradication 115
sults of ridicule, diminishment, or dehumanization. The Indianapolis Star ran a
cartoon by Gary Varvel in May 2004 showing an image of a Saddam-headed rat
trapped in a box, huddled out of the beam of an infantryman’s flashlight.81 Jeff
Parker’s “Foxy Saddam”82 shows British Prime Minister Tony Blair considering
a solution to the controversy over a fox hunting ban by showing a picture of
Saddam’s head on a fox’s body. Daryl Cagle’s “Saddam Skin Rug” shows George
Bush posed in a big-game hunter’s pith helmet on a bearskin rug; the head of
the bear is the head of Saddam Hussein (see figure 5.3)83 This human-animal
fusion, a common feature of the visual shorthand of cartoons, is sometimes
called homospatiality, in which two distinct visual images are merged into a single image within which separate components can still be detected.84 In “Saddam Skin Rug” then, Saddam’s head is still clearly discernable as a human head,
while the attached body is still clearly an animal. Technically, the clear presence
Figure 5.3.
Daryl Cagle. “Saddam Skin Rug.” MSNBC.com. December 29, 2006.
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of both visual elements in the fused form makes it difficult to misunderstand or
misidentify the cartoon’s figures. Visually, however, it solidifies and confirms the
mutated otherness of the monstrous figure, to the extent that we may feel no
recognition of its debased humanity even in its death and defeat. Its very visual
monstrosity suggests that it is right and natural that it be the hunter’s prey. As
with any system of metaphors that collaborate to supply a consistent visual vocabulary, one of the key effects here is that such metaphors come, in themselves,
to be considered “relatively ‘natural’ and unremarkable.”85
Another example of the hunt metaphor in action is found in Mark
Streeter’s depiction of a giant, plumed, heroic-looking eagle descending with
talons spread to grasp a tiny creature labeled Saddam popping his head out of
the earth; the caption reads “Eagle Captures Chicken in Rat Hole.”86 The
diminution of the enemy into inhuman insignificance is a thread that can be
identified in several cartoons: in the Los Angeles Times, Michael Ramirez’s
cartoon shows a huge hand in a sleeve decorated with American stars clutching a tiny, be-whiskered rat labeled “Saddam” over the caption “Gotcha!”87
In Rod Emmerson’s “A Weapon of Mass Humiliation,”88 a rat with the face
of Saddam sighs in resignation as Uncle’s Sam’s arm, with its identifying
stars-and-stripes sleeve, reaches out a gloved hand to fastidiously pluck up
the annoying vermin by the tail. In Allen Lauzon Falcon’s “Saddam Rat
Caught” (see figure 5.4),89 we find yet another depiction of Uncle Sam’s
gloved hand, in the familiar stars-and-stripes sleeve, holding between thumb
and forefinger a bedraggled-looking “Saddam Rat,” pictured with a scaly tail
snaking out from beneath a patched, filthy robe. The enemy as a slightly
ridiculous, trivialized pest is also present in Jeff Parker’s 2005 cartoon90 showing an imperious but irritated British lion, draped in the Union Jack, directing an annoyed glance at a black rat labeled “terrorism” that is chomping on
the lion’s tail. In the “America’s hand” cartoons, however, we see something
not present in the English cartoon, that is, the significant suggestion of precision, cleanliness, and fastidiousness. The aim of America’s giant hand is excellent; it holds in its grasp only the singular enemy. Like the paterfamilias
whose job is to protect wife and children by plucking up and disposing of the
rodent, the symbolic American hand does not turn away from the dirty job
that must be done but performs it, with neatness and precision, on our behalf. In these images the task is portrayed as necessary and almost surgical. In
fact, in Emmerson’s and Lauzon’s cartoons, the rolled wrists of Uncle Sam’s
white gloves visually suggest a doctor’s gloves, donned for serious tasks and
disposed of later for reasons of hygiene. In each of the “America’s hand” cartoons, we see no messiness, no blood, no civilian deaths, only the singular
and easily identified enemy dangling mid-air; the scale, scope, and damage of
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Figure 5.4.
14, 2003.
Allen Lauzon Falcon. “Saddam Rat Caught.” Caglecartoons.com December
the war are completely unrepresented in this image of paternal protection.
The paternal hand metaphor, in suggesting a surgical precision to the act of
stopping the enemy, does something similar to what Lakoff observes at work
in the “Nation as a Person” metaphor, in which a country’s leader represents
and stands in for all its people. Lakoff notes that this metaphor hides the fact
that “the 3000 bombs to be dropped in the first two days [of the war on Iraq]
will not be dropped on that one person. They will kill many thousands of the
people hidden by the metaphor, people that according to the metaphor we
are not going to war against.”91
Hiding a nation’s citizens behind a metaphor that obscures their individuality is also a key function of insect and, especially, swarm metaphors. Metaphors
associating the enemy with the indiscriminate (they attack blindly because of
their inherently destructive nature) and with the interchangeable (they are
identical in nature, motivation and intent) appear in editorial cartoons as in
other forms of media. In Cameron Cardow’s 2006 cartoon from the Ottawa Citizen (see figure 5.5),92 terrorists are drawn as realistic-looking cockroaches crawling over the surface of the Canadian flag, with a caption that reads “Terrorists.
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Figure 5.5.
Cameron Cardow. “Canada Buggy Flag.” Ottawa Citizen. June 11, 2006.
Even the best homes get them.” This message generates anxiety in Canadians
who may have felt safe in their presumption that terrorism is something that
happens elsewhere; it delivers a jarring message of vulnerability: your home, too,
is prey to these inhuman incursions. On an intellectual level, the cartoon plays
with the idea of the domestic and the political: on an emotional level, however,
it strikes viscerally. By verbally and visually conflating “nation” with “home” in
the cartoon’s juxtaposition of the flag with its reference to “the best homes,”
alarm is elevated to paranoia: the word home calls up all that is closest to us, and
makes the threat appear not political but deeply personal. In this way, the cartoon’s internal logic is not far from historical propaganda images of the enemy
as invader and defiler. The insects crawling over the flag recall images from The
Eternal Jew of Jews as rats crawling across a map of Europe. Enemies come at us,
these images imply, through our families and our homes. The enemy is portrayed
as corrupter, entering and despoiling the sacred space of home, bringing filth,
disease, and spoilage in its wake. In Cardow’s cartoon the elaborate visual detail
of the roaches evokes a shudder; their flat bodies and sweeping antenna seem to
desecrate the flag they crawl upon. The grotesqueries of the depiction seem to
demand a response of extermination; as Keen reminds us, the “lower down in
the animal phyla” enemy metaphors descend, “the greater sanction is given to
the soldier to become a mere exterminator.”93 This is reflected in Daryl Cagle’s
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2001 cartoon “Dead or Alive” (see figure 5.6)94 George Bush, dressed in cowboy costume complete with sheriff’s star, fires his six-shooters repeatedly into a
teeming swarm of cockroaches, under a “WANTED: Dead or Alive” poster of a
single, huge roach. There is a significant visual tension in the cartoon between
the single “criminal” roach shown in the poster and the massed, teeming swarm
into which Sheriff Bush is firing. It is clearly impossible for either Bush or the
viewer to identify the individual “wanted” cockroach among the horde; they all
merge into a single, inseparable identity. While Bush’s use of pistols to kill cockroaches is offered as a kind of comic overkill, viewers may find themselves identifying with Bush’s stance, since we, like him, cannot be expected to differentiate between individual bugs in the advancing tide. Within this conceptual
frame, there are no “innocent” insects, a frame that extends to encompass the
human enemy so frequently, through the lens of Orientalism, de-individualized.
In R. J. Matson’s “Iraq Hornets,”95 a frantic Uncle Sam, covered with
swollen bug bites, swings a baseball bat at the swarm of insects emerging from
a smashed hornet’s nest labeled “Iraq.” In the background, George Bush
pokes at stick at an apparently empty hornet’s nest labeled “Iran,” saying “I’m
guessing most of these bad boys are coming from here.” Matson’s cartoon
seems critical of the hornet’s nest that Bush has embroiled Uncle Sam in
while he stands at a safe distance. The metaphoric entrapment of the insect
Figure 5.6.
Daryl Cagle. “Dead or Alive.” MSNBC.Com. September 20, 2001.
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metaphor is still at work, however, reduplicating the conceptual structures
through which we see the enemy.
Within the persuasive or rhetorical text even of a cartoon intending
critique, then, metaphors may still, as Hart and Hassencahl observe,
“oversimplify a complex situation” or “hide important facts.”96 In capturing a complex situation through its compressed graphics, a cartoon may
employ visual codes that confirm an understanding of the enemy that the
overt message of the cartoon would refute. In this way, what Gamson and
Stuart call the “condensing symbols” of a political cartoon may “suggest
the core frame” of the issue97 and that conceptual frame may, in subtle
ways, work against the cartoon’s dominant meaning, and confirm a construction of the enemy that the cartoonist might never choose consciously
to advocate.
In Monte Wolverton’s “Insurg-ants,”98 streams of ants descend on a picnic
of “U.S. Corporate Interests in Iraq.” The cartoon is clearly intended to be
critical of Bush’s policies: stamping madly on the insurgent ants, the President is portrayed as a demented-looking hillbilly with flapping ears and goofy
scowl; motion lines around feet, elbows and knees suggest the comically frantic speed of his desperate jig. The business-suited picnickers labeled “US Corporate Interests” are represented as grinning stupidly or scowling slyly, toasting themselves with champagne against the backdrop of a war-torn desert
landscape. The streaming “insurg-ants” in the foreground, however, are still
apt to provide a stronger visceral shudder than the human businessmen in
the background: while it takes a few minutes to decode their depiction of corporate greed, interest, and self-satisfaction, the message of the massing bugs
is much more immediate. For a reader predisposed to look for a confirmation
of his or her existing metaphors of the enemy, the cartoon’s vision of the tide
of insects provides just such a corroboration.
There are a few examples of political cartoons that overtly take on not
only government policy in the war on terror but also the conceptual framework through which those policies are articulated. In a 2003 cartoon by Mike
Lester99 (see figure 5.7), for example, we see in the foreground Uncle Sam
wearing a uniform labeled “Sam’s Pest Control” and holding a canister of poison. In the other hand, he proudly holds up a dangling rat. Around him is an
utterly destroyed house. Furniture is overturned amid piles of rubble, and
there are only a few walls left standing; behind one broken wall we see a
glimpse of a tank, and through a ragged hole in the roof we see the tower of
a mosque. In the middle of this wreckage stands an Arabic family. Mother
and son gaze in blank shock at the ruin of their home; the father, a pained
smile on his face, stammers, as Sam proudly proffers the rat, “Thanks . . . I
Infestation and Eradication 121
Figure 5.7. Mike Lester. “Sam’s Pest Control.” The Rome News-Tribune (Georgia).
April 4, 2003.
think.” This cartoon is remarkable for the way it turns the pest metaphor
back on itself, clearly implying that the wanton degree of destruction caused
by the hunt for a single enemy rat is dangerously disproportionate. Equally
remarkably, the cartoon paints both the result of the hunt and the Arab family in pointedly human terms: the humanity of the pictured Iraqis is emphasized by their domestic setting and family grouping, an image radically different from the undifferentiated swarms through which they are often
represented. The human costs of the war in Iraq are thus poignantly evoked,
as symbolized in the small but central image of a family photograph, knocked
carelessly aside by the exterminator’s violence.
Exterminating Enemies
Metaphors, far from being merely descriptive, affect the way that we think
and act. By defining the challenging task of addressing terrorism as a “war,”
we define our response as a militaristic one. We undermine our ability to conceive of and win support for the alternative solutions that could be called up
by a different set of metaphors. When we describe our enemies and people
who look like them through sub-human metaphors, we foster human rights
violations and war crimes. When we define people as pests it becomes more
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legitimate, imaginatively and politically, to consider exterminating them.
What happens, then, when the actual weapons of war are designed for literal
extermination? Edmund Russell’s book War and Nature: Fighting Humans and
Insects with Chemicals from World War I to Silent Spring documents the development of chemical warfare against human and insect enemies by the American military and the chemical industry in the last century. Russell chronicles how corporations developing insecticides applied their skills to the
invention of chemical weapons such as poison gas, incendiary bombs, and
antimalarial DDT spraying for use in tropical war zones, leading to the use of
chemical defoliants as weapons. The use of chemical warfare against both humans and insects was facilitated by the economic and institutional interrelationship developed between military, government, industrial and educational
institutions. Russell argues that chemical poisoning as a way to eradicate
both human and insect enemies reflects a particular fear and hatred of enemies who transgress boundaries. As the use of chemical warfare and insecticides increased, humans and insects were metaphorically figured as trespassers. Although most insects were present in North America long before
human farmers, fences and walls offered a sense of ownership to landholders,
who spoke of the insects in the field as “invaders.”100 Similarly, national borders confirmed the distinction between insiders and outsiders, emphasizing
the necessity of protecting citizens by “exterminating” enemies or driving
them beyond the civic boundary. Propaganda in official and unofficial forms
reinforced the equation of pests and enemies; in an advertisement for insecticide, for example, the Rohm and Haas Company “paired a drawing of a soldier shooting a Japanese soldier (in the back) with a drawing of another person shooting a fly with a [poison spraying] Flitgun. ‘Whether Japs or flies,’ the
text read, ‘it’s fast action that counts.’”101 This symbolic conflation of insect
and enemy was echoed by Chief William N. Porter of the Chemical Warfare
Service in 1944 when he wrote that “We wish, at the moment, to poison insects because they threaten the health of our troops. Coincidentally the
Chemical Warfare Service . . . is actively at work in an attempt to improve
our methods for poisoning Germans and Japanese. . . . The fundamental biological principles of poisoning Japanese, insects, rats, bacteria, and cancer
are essentially the same.102
While Porter’s words speak to the practical similarities between “poisoning Japanese, insects, rats, bacteria, and cancer,”103 the ideological similarities linking enemy, disease, and insect were already well established. A year
after Chief Porter spoke of the same “fundamental biological principles” involved in killing human and inhuman pests, a cartoon published in the U.S.
Marine magazine Leatherneck, illustrated the linking of the two, a rhetorical
Infestation and Eradication 123
and metaphorical linkage that continued to support the pragmatic efforts of
developing and applying chemical tools of annihilation. The Leatherneck cartoon depicts the “Louseous Japanicas,”104 a hairy, multi-legged, pincered louse
with huge protruding fangs, slanted eyes, and devil horns; examined closely,
its spatulate tail reveals the Japanese rising sun military insignia. The artist,
Sargent Fred Laswell, noted in the cartoon’s caption that the Marine Corps
was “especially trained” in fighting “this lice epidemic,” and was thus assigned “the gigantic task of extermination.” Before a “complete cure” of “the
plague” may be affected, the caption continues, “the insects’ breeding
grounds around the Tokyo area . . . must be completely annihilated.”105
While, Russell observes, the intent of the cartoon was surely meant as “humorous and hyperbolic,” it expressed a very real, very serious shift in the
technologies of warfare; by the end of WWII, the annihilation of human enemies had become a realistic possibility, thanks to the production of ever
more effective chemical weapons; while the cartoon’s personifications may
have been exaggerated, the threat they represented was not.
While Russell acknowledges the difficulty in quantifying the impact that
ideas about insects and nature had on the war’s policies and conduct,106 the fact
that American military propaganda, soldiers in the field, and journalism at
home all employed similar language about the insect-enemy is suggestive. U.S.
government posters such as Enemies Both107 (see figure 5.8) illustrate this: it
shows a gun-toting Uncle Sam clutching an oversized, fanged mosquito labeled
“Malaria” in one hand and a bucktoothed Japanese soldier in the other. To reinforce their visual equivalence, both bug and human dangle in exactly the
same posture, limbs identically splayed. The poster’s caption confirms their
equivalence, labeling insect and human “ENEMIES BOTH!” and reminding
soldiers “It’s your job to help eliminate them.”108 Soldiers readily absorbed this
message: in his book God Is My Co-Pilot, pilot Robert L. Scott Jr. said that
every time he killed a “Jap” he felt as though “he had stepped on another blackwidow spider or scorpion,” a stance echoed in his naming of his airplane “Old
Exterminator.”109 Journalism echoed this language; in a 1945 article called
“Rodent Exterminators,” Time Magazine called America’s victory in Iwo Jima
the completion of “the Pacific’s nastiest exterminating job.”110
Predictably, this language spread to civilian discourse; Russell cites a letter written in 1945 to the editor of the Milwaukee Journal by Leonie M. Cole
complaining that America had stopped short of its aims by accepting Japanese surrender. “Japan,” says Cole, is a “terrible evil,” and should be “wiped
away completely, once and for all.” Making the link with insect annihilation
explicit, she continues: “When one sets out to destroy vermin, does one try
to leave a few alive in the nest? Most certainly not!”111
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Chapter Five
Figure 5.8.
“Enemies Both.” U.S. Government poster, 1944.
This language of extermination and eradication is not exclusive to the
twentieth century; history tells us it has been a long-standing feature of warfare and enemy construction. Since so much of Western thought has rested
on the notion that to subdue the natural world and its creatures is a moral
duty, part of the great civic endeavor of civilization, linking the enemy to the
sub-human world has often been used to provide an answer to those debating the morality of war.112 What changed in the twentieth century was our
ability, through new technologies, to act on extermination fantasies on a
scale previously unimagined, and our ability to disseminate on an unforseen
scale a metaphorical vocabulary that ideologically and imaginatively sup-
Infestation and Eradication 125
ports that enactment. This merging of technology and ideology calls us, more
urgently than ever, to hold ourselves to account for the form taken by our
public discourse as we face a new century in which the relation of the worlds
of culture and nature are ever more central and ever more urgent.
We tend to look back in horror at the dehumanizing depictions of the enemy that emerged in the wars of the early twentieth century. As enlightened
citizens, we want to distance ourselves from their blatant hatefulness, their
cultivated anxiety, their vicious rhetorical extremities; we want to point instead to the progress we have made away from propaganda, paranoia, and the
kinds of genocidal slaughter made infamous by regimes such as Nazi Germany. How is it, then, that we find ourselves facing in our current media
echoes of those earlier metaphors? How is 1944’s cartoon “Louseus Japanicus”
substantively different from 2006’s “Forked Tongue,” with its fanged and
slant-eyed snake labeled “Iran”? How is Chief Porter’s assertion of the similarities in the principles of poisoning Japanese people and cancer different
from the sentiment expressed in Cox and Forkum’s 2007 cartoon “Metastasis,”113 in which the X-ray of a cancerous patient reveals a brain tumor labeled “Islamism,” suggesting that not terrorism but an entire religion is, as
the doctor somberly tells the patient, “Malignant”? The fact that we treat
such images merely as jokes, like the “Lake Iraq” merchandise that offers humourous reference to nuclear annihilation, might obscure the somber second
half of the equation of enemies with insects. If such images suggest that we
are already imaginatively half-way to a deadly endpoint of dehumanization,
do we really want to complete the equation and go the rest of the distance to
nuclear war? If we can find nothing to smile about in the memorials for the
nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, then perhaps we need to begin
publically questioning our production of images that memorialize projected
fantasies of death, resisting the urge to hide hatred beyond the obscuring, if
sickly, smile.
Notes
1. Doug Marlette. “Journalism’s Wild Man.” American Journalism Review. January/
February 1992. See www.ajr.org/Article.asp?id=1444 (July 3, 2007).
2. Jack Valenti. “Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council.” October 1,
1998. posted on Los Angeles World Affairs Council web site. See www.lawac.org/speech
/pre percent20sept percent2004 percent20speeches/valenti.html (July 3, 2007).
3. David Robb. Operation Hollywood: How the Pentagon Shapes and Censors the
Movies. New York: Prometheus Books, 2004.
4. Jack Shaheen. Interviewed in Reel Bad Arabs. [videorecording]. Media Education Foundation, 2006.
126
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5. Jack Shaheen. Interviewed in Reel Bad Arabs. [videorecording].
6. Jack Shaheen. Interviewed in Reel Bad Arabs. [videorecording].
7. Ilene Lelchuk. “‘Convert or die’ game divides Christians: Some ask Wal-Mart to
drop Left Behind.” San Francisco Chronicle. December 12, 2006. See sfgate.com/
cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2006/12/12/MNG8TMU1KQ1.DTL&type=printable (July
3, 2007).
8. Jose Antonio Vargas. “Way Radical, Dude: Video Games with an Islamist
Twist.” Washington Post. October 9, 2006.
9. Anti-Defamation League. “Racist Groups Using Computer Gaming to Promote
Violence against Blacks, Latinos and Jews.”Anti-Defamation League. February 12, 2002.
See www.adl.org/videogames/default.asp (July 3, 2007).
10. John Powers. “300: Racist War Propaganda with Septic Timing.” Art Threat
Political Art Magazine. March 2007. See www.artthreat.net/2007/03/95 (July 1, 2007).
11. John Powers. “300: Racist War Propaganda with Septic Timing.”
12. John Powers. “300: Racist War Propaganda with Septic Timing.”
13. Jack Shaheen. Interviewed in Reel Bad Arabs. [videorecording]. Media Education Foundation, 2006.
14. Laurence Michalak. “Arab in American Cinema.” Social Studies Review. Fall
2002, 42(1), 11–17.
15. Jack Shaheen. Iinterviewed in Reel Bad Arabs.
16. Jack Shaheen. Iinterviewed in Reel Bad Arabs.
17. Sam Smith. “The semiotics of a terrorist bombing.” Insight on the News, June
5, 1995. See findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1571/is_n22_v11/ai_16936757 (July 3,
2007).
18. Kenneth H. Bacon. “DoD News Briefing.” U.S. Department of Defense. April
24, 1995. See www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=123 (July
3, 2007).
19. Human Rights Watch. “We Are Not the Enemy: Hate Crimes against Arabs,
Muslims, and Those Perceived to be Arab or Muslim after September 11.” Human
Rights Watch, November 2002, Vol. 14: 12.
20. The Wisdom Fund. “The ‘Who’ In American Media.” The Wisdom Fund. August 9, 1995. See www.twf.org/News/Y1997/Who.html (July 3, 2007).
21. Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard. The Hollywood War Machine. Paradigm Publishers, 2006: 9.
22. Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard. The Hollywood War Machine.
23. Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard. The Hollywood War Machine.
24. Jack Shaheen. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People. Interlink Publishing Group, 2001.
25. Jack Shaheen. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People.
26. Jack Shaheen. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People.
27. Jack Shaheen. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People.
28. Jack Shaheen. Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People.
Infestation and Eradication 127
29. Carl Boggs and Tom Pollard. The Hollywood War Machine.
30. Matthew Rothschild. “‘Deck of Weasels’ Lists 54 ‘Anti-American, Pro-Saddam’
Leaders and Celebs.” The Progressive. May 14, 2003. See www.progressive.org/mag
_mcweasel (July 1, 2007).
31. Matthew Rothschild. “‘Deck of Weasels’ Lists 54 ‘Anti-American, Pro-Saddam’
Leaders and Celebs.”
32. Matthew Rothschild. . “‘Deck of Weasels’ Lists 54 ‘Anti-American, Pro-Saddam’
Leaders and Celebs.”
33. Heather Havrilesky. “The selling of 9/11.” Salon. September 7, 2002.
See dir.salon.com/story/mwt/feature/2002/09/07/purchase_power/index.html?
pn=2 (July 1, 2007).
34. Nabeel Abraham. “The Gulf Crisis and Anti-Arab Racism in America.” In
Collateral Damage: The New World Order at Home and Abroad. Cynthia Peters (ed).
Boston: South End Press, 1991: 259.
35. Heather Havrilesky. op. cit.
36. See www.therightthings.com
37. See www.almostaproverb.com
38. Pat. “Untitled.” patshideout. March 14, 2002. See www.patshideout.com/the
attic.htm (July 3, 2007).
39. See www.cafepress.com
40. Lucy Shelton Caswell. “Drawing Swords: War in American Editorial Cartoons.” American Journalism. 21(2), 2004:13–45.
41. Lucy Shelton Caswell. “Drawing Swords.”
42. Lucy Shelton Caswell. “Drawing Swords.”
43. Michael DeSousa and Martin Medhurst. “Political cartoons and American
Culture: Significant Symbols of campaign 1980,” Studies in Visual Communication.
8:1, Winter 1982.
44. Virginia Bouvier. “Imaging a Nation: U.S. political cartoons and the war of
1898.” In Whose War; the War of 1898 and the Battles to Define the Nation. Virginia
Marie Bouvier (ed). Westport, CT: Praeger, 2001: 91.
45. Lucy Shelton Caswell. “Drawing Swords.”
46. Lucy Shelton Caswell. “Drawing Swords.”
47. Elizabeth El Refaie. “Understanding Visual Metaphor: the example of newspaper cartoons.” Visual Communication. 2 (1), 2003: 75–95.
48. E. H. Gombrich cited in Elizabeth El Refaie. “Understanding Visual Metaphor:
the example of newspaper cartoons.” Visual Communication. 2 (1), 2003: 75–95.
49. Elizabeth El Refaie. “Understanding Visual Metaphor.”
50. Gelu Sulugiuc. “Danish paper cleared in Muslim libel lawsuit: Muhammad
cartoons.” National Post. Oct 27, 2006: 12.
51. Shanti Kumar. “Religious Tolerance versus Tolerance of Religion: A Critique
of the Cartoon Controversy in Jyllands-Posten.” FlowTV. March 10, 2006. See flowtv
.org/?p=150 (July 3, 2007).
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52. Pernille Ammitzbøll and Lorenzo Vidino. “After the Danish Cartoon Controversy.” Middle East Quarterly. Winter 2007. See www.meforum.org/article/1437#_ftn14
(July 3, 2007).
53. Warriors for Truth. See www.warriorsfortruth.com/mohammedpercent20cartoons
.html (July 3, 2007).
54. CNN. “In Libya, 11 reportedly die in cartoon protests.” February 18, 2006. See
edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/africa/02/17/libya.cartoons/index.html
55. BBC. “Cartoons row hits Danish exports.” BBC News. September 9, 2006. See
news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/5329642.stm (July 3, 2007).
56. Christian Allen Purefoy. “Five days of violence by Nigerian Christians and
Muslims kill 150.” The Independent. February 24, 2006. See news.independent.co.uk
/world/Africa/article347374.ece (July 3, 2007).
57. Flemming Rose. “Why I Published Those Cartoons.” Washington Post. February 19, 2006. See www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2006/02/17
/AR2006021702499.html (July 3, 2007).
58. Flemming Rose. “Muhammeds ansigt.” Jyllands-Posten. September 30, 2005.
59. Khalil Bendib. “Your Islamophobic Fist Must Stop At My Muslim Nose.”
altmuslim.com. February 17, 2006. See www.altmuslim.com/perm.php?id=1658_0_25
_0_C42 (July 3, 2007).
60. Reza Aslan. “Depicting Mohammed: Why I’m offended by the Danish cartoons of the prophet.” Slate. February 8, 2006. See www.slate.com/id/2135661/ (July
3, 2007).
61. Reza Aslan. “Depicting Mohammed.”
62. Reza Aslan. “Depicting Mohammed.”
63. Khalil Bendib. “Your Islamophobic Fist Must Stop At My Muslim Nose.”
64. As’ad. “Danish Cartoons (not pastries).” Angry Arab. February 4, 2006. See
angryarab.blogspot.com/2006/02/danish-cartoons-not-pastries.html (July 3, 2007).
65. Tariq Ali. “This is the real outrage.” The Guardian. February 13, 2006. See
www .guardian .co.uk/cartoonprotests/story/0,,1708319,00.html (July 3, 2007).
66. Tariq Ali. “This is the real outrage.”
67. Artz and Mark A Pollock. “Limiting the Options: AntiArab Images in U.S. Media Coverage of the Persian Gulf Crisis.” in The U.S. Media and the Middle East: Images
and Perception. Kamalipour, Yahya R (Ed). Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1995.
68. J. L. Conners. “Hussein as enemy: The Persian Gulf War in political cartoons.”
Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics. 3 (3), 96–114. 1998.
69. William Hart and Fran Hassencahl. “Dehumanizing the enemy in editorial
cartoons.” in B. S. Greeberge (ed). Communication and Terrorism: Public and Media
Responses to 9/11. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2002: 137–51.
70. Stanley Fish. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980.
71. Jeff Parker. “9 11 Terror Eagle.” Florida Today. September 7, 2002.
72. Steve Breen. “Untitled.” San Diego Union-Tribune. September 13, 2001.
Infestation and Eradication 129
73. John Cox and Allen Forkum. “Forked Tongue.” Cox and Forkum.com. June
18, 2006. See www.coxandforkum.com/archives/000868.html (July 3, 2007).
74. Deng Coy Miel. “Terrorism as a Snake-hydra.” The Straits Times (Singapore).
November 27, 2005.
75. Mike Lester “Spawn.” The Rome News-Tribune (Georgia). September 25,
2006.
76. D.K. Mumby and C. Spitzack. “Ideology and Television News: a Metaphoric
Analysis of Political Stories.” Central States Speech Journal. Vol. 34, 1983 162–71.
77. Sandy Huffaker. “Al Jazeera.” Cagle Cartoons. March 27, 2003.
78. BBC. “Al-Jazeera English TV date set.” BBC. November 1, 2006. See news
.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6105952.stm (July 3, 2007).
79. Jeremy Scahill. “Did Bush Really Want to Bomb Al Jazeera?” The Nation.
November 23, 2005. See www.thenation.com/doc/20051212/scahill (July 3, 2007).
80. Murray Edelman. Politics as Symbolic Action: Mass Arousal and Quiescence.
Chicago: Markham,1971.
81. Gary Varvel. “We Got Him.” The Indianapolis Star News. May 2004.
82. Jeff Parker. “Foxy Saddam.” Florida Today. September 24, 2002.
83. Daryl Cagle. “Saddam Skin Rug.” MSNBC.com. December 29, 2006.
84. Cited in Elizabeth El Refaie. “Understanding Visual Metaphor.”
85. Elizabeth El Refaie. “Understanding Visual Metaphor.”
86. Mark Streeter. “Untitled.” The Savannah Morning News. May 14, 2004.
87. Michael Ramirez. “Gotcha.” Los Angeles Times. December 15, 2003.
88. Rod Emmerson. “Untitled.” The New Zealand Herald. April 23, 2004.
89. Allen Lauzon Falcon. “Saddam Rat Caught.” Caglecartoons.com December
14, 2003.
90. Jeff Parker. “London Bombings.” Florida Today. July 7, 2005.
91. George Lakoff. “ Metaphor and War, Again.” AlterNet. March 18, 2003. See
www .alternet.org/story/15414/ (July 3, 2007).
92. Cameron Cardow. “Canada Buggy Flag.” Ottawa Citizen. June 11, 2006.
93. Sam Keen. Faces of the Enemy: Reflections of the Hostile Imagination. New
York: Harper Collins; Reprint edition. September 1991.
94. Daryl Cagle. “Dead or Alive.” MSNBC.com. September 20, 2001.
95. R.J. Matson. “Iraq Hornets.” St. Louis Post Dispatch. March 24, 2006.
96. William Hart and Fran Hassencahl. op. cit.
97. William Gamson and D. Stuart. “Media Discourse as a Symbolic Contest:
the Bomb in Political Cartoons.” Sociological Forum. Vol. 7, No. 1, 1992: 55–86.
98. Monte Wolverton. “Insurg-ants.” Cagle Cartoons. February 20, 2005.
99. Mike Lester. “Sam’s Pest Control.” The Rome News-Tribune (Georgia). April
4, 2003.
100. Edmund Russell. War and Nature. London: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
101. Edmund Russell. War and Nature.
102. Edmund Russell. War and Nature.
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103. Edmund Russell. War and Nature.
104. Fred Laswell. “Louseous Japanicas: Bugs every marine should know.” Leatherneck 28 March 1945: 35–27.
105. Edmund Russell. War and Nature.
106. Fred Laswell. “Louseous Japanicas.”
107. Frank Mack 23rd Bomb. “Enemies Both.” U.S. government poster. 1944. USGPO 44PA 720. Still Pictures Branch, U.S. National Archives and Records Administration.
108. Edmund Russell. War and Nature.
109. Edmund Russell. War and Nature.
110. Edmund Russell. War and Nature.
111. Edmund Russell. War and Nature.
112. Edmund Russell. War and Nature.
113. John Cox and Allen Forkum. “Metastasis” Cox and Forkum.com. July 2, 2007.
See www.coxandforkum.com/archives/000868/html (July 3, 2007).
C H A P T E R
S I X
HateSpeak: Discourses of
Dehumanization in Talk Radio
In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
—Martin Luther King, Jr.
Talking about Talk Radio
In recent years, without a great deal of resistance or commentary, hate speech
has been institutionalized as part of contemporary mainstream media. It now
can be found on radio and television stations across the U.S., addressing audiences numbering in the millions. Popular right-wing talk show hosts broadcast inflammatory rhetoric daily, abusing and demonizing minorities, environmentalists, liberal politicians and government social programs. These
furious communications are not, as Sidney Blumenthal observes, an “underground phenomenon” circulating surreptitiously, but are “available daily in
any city or town on the radio dial, or on TV, or in the pages of conservative
publications.”1 The vitriolic extremity of the views expressed by so-called
shock-jock talk radio hosts and their callers have led them to be frequently
disregarded or marginalized as merely “fringe” voices, oddities of the far-right
that need not be taken seriously or given credence by offering them attention.
The popularity and sheer pervasiveness of these particular voices, however,
suggest that attention must be paid: through their programs, columns, and
best-selling books, such extreme views have entered, if only through the size
of the audience they regularly reach, the media mainstream, with all the
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power that implies. Since 9/11, their prime target has been Muslims, particularly Arab Muslims. Yigal Carmon of the Middle East Media Research Institute noted at the 2004 Stockholm International Forum on Genocide Prevention that genocide does not occur without dehumanization, and the media,
especially when it purveys hatred, is a key vehicle for accomplishing this.2
Hate speech is more than an onslaught of insults; it attacks on a variety of
levels, sometimes overt, sometimes subtle. It may be direct or indirect; it may
involve open threats or it may not. It may focus upon a single person or a
group, disparaging through sweeping attacks on race, sex, religion, sexual orientation, or national origin. Hate speech may fester within our social consciousness and prompt violent action. Since race-based hate speech can call
up and even replicate a history of violent acts, such as lynchings or the
American Indian wars, it is often more potent than other insults based on individual characteristics: insults alluding to a person’s clumsiness, size, or
plainness may be hurtful without carrying the potent ideological freight
found in racist insults that evoke generations of violence or oppression.3 Just
as the rise of reality television suggests a renewed relish in watching individual humiliation played out on a public stage, the rise of hate speech suggests
that collectively we share an uncomfortable pleasure in acting as its audience
and witness.
Violent inflammatory speech has become a staple of several talk radio
shows that have risen to prominence over the last decade. The hosts of these
programs are profoundly influential in shaping opinion among the documented 100 million Americans who listen regularly. Their messages are
widely broadcast on more than 1200 radio stations and are available on the
Internet, satellite radio, and television. Some, like Bill O’Reilly, have programs on both television and radio stations. Commentaries by big-name
hosts draw big ratings and, for the station’s corporate owners, translate to big
money from advertisers and profits for shareholders. Such success creates local and regional imitators who echo the unrestrained style and vocabulary of
the originals. Programs hosted by Michael Savage, Rush Limbaugh and Bill
O’Reilly have become big business.
A new era in talk radio began in 1987 with the Federal Communications
Commission’s repeal of the Fairness Doctrine. The Fairness Doctrine was intended to prohibit stations from airing only programs with a single perspective.
Stations were obligated to provide some opportunity for alternative views to be
heard; while equal time for divergent views was not required, at least some portion of the broadcasting schedule had to represent diverse opinions or perspectives. Since the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, says Todd Gitlin, radio networks have been governed by their “capacity to collect eardrums without any
regard for veracity let alone civility.”4 As a result, an imbalance of opinion and
HateSpeak 133
representation has developed: according to the Senate Democratic Policy
Committee, the top five radio station owners in the U.S. with stations of
50,000 watts or more broadcast only five hours of alternative opinion relative
to 310 hours of right-wing talk.5 One of the first radio personalities to benefit
from this new freedom was Rush Limbaugh. His vigorous denunciations of
Democrats, liberals, feminists and the left wing functioned less as news than
entertainment, and listeners couldn’t get enough of his uninhibited, provocative style. When ratings soared, stations across the country rushed to sign his
syndicated show. Steve Rendall, author of The Way Things Aren’t: Rush Limbaugh’s Reign of Error, notes that talk radio “was born in the backlash of a
bunch of white guys on the right railing against the Civil Rights Movement,
the women’s movement and the peace movement. Forty years later,” Rendall
continues, “little has changed.”6
Talk radio’s audience increased dramatically over the last two decades of
the twentieth century. Between 1980 and 1998, the number of programs increased from 75 to 1,350. The better sound quality provided by FM stations
left AM stations unable to compete in a music format; they found an unfilled
niche by switching to talk radio. A shift in population demographics also
played a role, since as people age, studies show, they begin to prefer talk to music programming.7 Technological advances also contributed; inexpensive 800
numbers, cell phones, and satellite communications made the call-in format
more accessible, while nationwide syndication provided stations with relatively low-cost programming. The audience for talk radio is still growing: the
Pew Research Center for People and the Press found that the number of adults
in the US who are regular listeners increased from 17 percent in 2004 to 20
percent in just two years.8 Nearly one-third of Americans listen to the syndicated programs of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O’Reilly and Michael Savage. Surprisingly, a report by the Center for American Progress and the Free Press discovered that only 43 percent of the audience of right-wing talk shows
described themselves as conservative. Of the rest, 23 percent identified themselves as liberal and 30 percent as moderates. While fewer than half of their
listeners are conservatives, network owners provide programming in which
nine out of ten hours of talk radio is right-wing and conservative. Therefore,
argues the Center, it appears to be corporate ownership of the media rather
than the political or social bent of the audience that is shaping programming.9
Talk Icons
Rush Limbaugh
Rush Limbaugh, whose career began in 1984, is the pre-eminent American
radio talk show host, boasting 13.5 million listeners across more than five
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hundred stations.10 His books have topped the bestseller lists: the recordbreaking The Way Things Ought to Be was a bestseller for over a year and
ranked #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for over twenty-five weeks.
Rush’s second book, See, I Told You So, sold so well it broke sales records.11
Limbaugh was the 1992, 1995, 2000 and 2005 recipient of the Marconi
Radio Award for Syndicated Radio Personality of the Year given by the National Association of Broadcasters. In 1993, he was inducted into the Radio
Hall of Fame. In 2002, the industry’s Talkers Magazine ranked him as the
greatest radio talk show host of all time.12 Currently, Limbaugh is the highest paid radio syndicator,13 earning approximately $30 million a year.14 In
2007, Limbaugh was awarded the inaugural William F. Buckley, Jr. Award for
Media Excellence by the Media Research Center, a conservative media
analysis group.15 Clearly, then, Limbaugh’s is not a marginalized voice but
one that is popular, influential, and broadly disseminated.
The dominance of Limbaugh’s voice in radio is echoed and reinforced
through the format of his three-hour daily program. Episodes feature extended
monologues presented in Limbaugh’s characteristically confident and fervent
tones. While the information he presents is often, critics say, far from factual,
his definitive manner and rapid-fire delivery appear to be compelling, expert,
and authoritative. Limbaugh’s voice dominates the show, which has few
guests, although high-profile Republicans such as Vice President Dick Cheney
provide legitimacy to the program through occasional guest appearances. Few
of the show’s pre-screened callers disagree with the host; in fact, a popular
caller shorthand is to say “ditto” as a quick way of signaling agreement with
Limbaugh’s opinions. The word suggests the extent of his influence: in 1994,
Limbaugh was widely credited with helping Republicans regain control of
Congress, and several newly elected Congressman openly acknowledged this
by calling themselves “the Dittohead caucus.”16 In recognition for his role in
promoting the Republican ticket, Limbaugh was invited to Washington,
where he was made an honorary member of the 104th Congress.
Not everyone is as enthusiastic about Limbaugh as his Dittohead fans. In
2003, he was forced to resign as a football commentator at ESPN amid allegations of racism, after he remarked on-air that Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb was given “extra credit” because the league and the
media wanted a black quarterback to be successful. He once told a black
caller to “take that bone out of your nose and call me back”; on another occasion he asked, “Have you ever noticed how all newspaper composite pictures of wanted criminals resemble Jesse Jackson?”17 When denounced for
such remarks by his critics, Limbaugh seems to relish the additional notoriety; certainly such criticisms have yet to diminish his number of listeners.
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Controversy fuels his popularity, and Limbaugh embraces it. While most
media voices were raised in shock or outrage at the scenes of abuse documented
in the Abu Ghraib photos, for example, Limbaugh trivialized them, likening
them to a “hazing” or “fraternity prank,” something no more serious than a college initiation.18 His rage was reserved for the torture victims and those decrying the abuse. He called the Iraqi prisoners, shown terrorized by guard dogs,
beaten and sexually humiliated, “sick” and “perverted”; he told his listeners,
“They are the ones who are dangerous. They are the ones who are subhuman.
They are the ones who are human debris, not the United States of America
and not our soldiers and not our prison guards.”19 Limbaugh also railed against
those demanding accountability for the abuses of Abu Ghraib, lamenting that
“we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a
good time.”20 Limbaugh linked the outrage over Abu Ghraib to a general softening of American rigor that is part of his larger complaint about feminism;
weak Americans couldn’t stomach the humiliation of the Iraqis, he claimed,
because “a lot of the American culture is being feminized. I think the reaction
to the stupid torture is an example of the feminization of this country.”21
In 2004, Media Matters for America launched an online petition to have
Limbaugh bounced from tax-payer funded American Forces Radio and Television Services in response to Limbaugh’s “condoning and trivializing the
abuse, torture, rape and possible murder of Iraqi prisoners.”22 Media Matters
founder David Brock said “It is abhorrent that the American taxpayer is paying to broadcast what is in effect pro-torture propaganda to American
troops.” The effort to withdraw the program was unsuccessful and it continues to be broadcast to military personnel.23
Bill O’Reilly
Bill O’Reilly, host of Fox News’ highest-rated show “The O’Reilly Factor,”
which attracts 3 to 3.5 million viewers daily, is another influential media
voice. O’Reilly’s “Radio Factor” is heard on more than four hundred stations
in the nation’s top markets. He also writes a syndicated newspaper column
that appears in hundreds of newspapers.24 O’Reilly’s six best-selling books
have spent multiple weeks on The New York Times best-sellers list. There are
over four million copies of his books in print, including a children’s book entitled The O’Reilly Factor for Kids: A Survival Guide for America’s Families,
which was 2005’s best-selling nonfiction children’s book.
A two-time Emmy Award winner for excellence in reporting, O’Reilly
served as national correspondent for ABC News and as anchor of the nationally syndicated news magazine program Inside Edition.25 He has been the
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subject of profiles in GQ, Newsweek, People, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, New York, New York Observer, Newsday
and the New York Post. The magazine Brill’s Content named him one of the
top fifty journalists in the country. According to Forbes magazine, O’Reilly
charges a reported $50,000 per speaking engagement and earns $9 million a
year. 26
O’Reilly is known for his abrasive treatment of guests who oppose him,
regularly shouting at them to “shut up.” A profile in Salon magazine stated
that “His style is neither to engage the logic of an opposing point of view nor
to acknowledge an inconvenient fact.”27 While this style might make for
lively television, it does not reflect the highest standards of journalism or debate. Researchers at the Indiana University School of Journalism analyzed
O’Reilly’s “Talking Points Memo” editorials using propaganda analysis techniques and found that O’Reilly’s rhetoric included many of the techniques
and devices of propaganda, including frequent name-calling and the use of
fear.28
One of the threats O’Reilly regularly alludes to is Iraq. He describes Iraqis
as “primitive” and “prehistoric” and has compared the Muslim holy book, the
Koran, to Hitler’s Mein Kampf. He suggests that the only apt intervention in
the Muslim world is destruction: “What we can do is bomb the living daylights out of them.”29 O’Reilly advocates the destruction of troublesome
countries, questioning why the U.S. military did not simply level Fallujah or
“bomb the Afghan infrastructure to rubble.”30 Just as Limbaugh blamed the
victims of Abu Ghraib for their abuse, O’Reilly blames Afghan civilians for
the hardships they experience because they are collectively “responsible for
the Taliban.”31 America should not “target civilians,” he says, “but if they
don’t rise up against this criminal government, they starve, period.”32 For
O’Reilly, human life in certain countries seems inherently less valuable than
human life in America; he notes, for example, that since life expectancy in
Afghanistan is so short, “killing someone there is not like killing people
here.”33
When he says these things, advocating what critic Thomas Wheeler has
called Bill O’Reilly’s Final Solution: Bomb the Living Daylights out of Them,34
O’Reilly may consider he is only engaging in the hyperbolic rhetoric that has
become a convention in some kinds of media. His exhortations need to be examined, however, in light of the strictures established in the Geneva Convention. It defines the destruction of infrastructure such as water treatment facilities and power plants as a war crime since it puts the survival of the civilian
population at risk and thus violates international law. Deliberate starvation of
civilians as a method of warfare is also prohibited by the Geneva Convention.
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O’Reilly’s open advocacy of these strategies should not, then, be taken lightly,
since they could involve the U.S. in activities which are defined as war crimes.
Michael Savage
Michael Savage hosts The Savage Nation, a nationally syndicated radio show
broadcast by more than three hundred stations to an audience of 8.25 million listeners. His program is characterized by caustic comments aimed at his
favorite targets, including homosexuals, feminists, and pacifists. His brief
foray into television ended after five months when he was fired by MSNBC
for telling a caller to “Get AIDS and die, you pig.”35 According to Salon’s Sidney Blumenthal, “[Savage] had just gone an insult too far for a mainstream
network that had hired him in the first place on his reputation for slurs that
it hoped would attract an audience share from Fox.”36 Despite this reputation, or because of it, in June 2007, Michael Savage was given Talkers magazine’s Freedom of Speech Award.37
Not only does Savage have an outlet for his opinions on radio but his book
The Savage Nation was on the New York Times bestseller list for over twenty
weeks. In it he labels opponents of the Iraq war “traitors” and “America’s
most dangerous enemy.” In this he echoes O’Reilly, who advised listeners
that once “the war against Saddam Hussein begins, we expect every American to support our military, and if you can’t do that, just shut up. Americans,
and indeed our foreign allies who actively work against our military once the
war is underway, will be considered enemies of the state by me.”38
Savage furiously attacked Americans who commented publicly on the
massacre in Haditha, in which U.S. Marines were accused of deliberately
shooting twenty-four Iraqi civilians, including unarmed women and children.39 Savage claimed that Time magazine reporter Tim McGirk, CNN host
Wolf Blitzer, and U.S. Congressman Jack Murtha, who have all commented
on the massacre, belong in “shackles.”40 Like O’Reilly, Savage has advocated
extreme tactics, warning that Israel would lose in Lebanon unless “nothing is
left living in southern Lebanon.”41 He has declared that “there shall be no
mercy shown to these sub-humans. I believe that a thousand of them should
be killed tomorrow. I think a thousand of them held in the Iraqi prison
should be given 24 hours [for a] trial and executed.”42 He has even suggested
a method for such executions: “They should put dynamite in their behinds
and drop them from 35,000 feet, the whole pack of scum out of that jail.”43
In such comments, Savage reflects the two overlapping metaphorical
frames of the indistinguishability of the sub-human enemy and their spreading verminous nature. This double-frame justifies and in fact calls for massive, sweeping retaliation, in which the death of any of the enemy-Other is
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justified. We see this in Savage’s recommendation that the U.S. flatten the
U.N. building in New York with a “bunker-buster bomb” when Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spoke to the General Assembly: after warning
“our friends,” Savage argued, the United States should “just take him out
with everyone in there.”44 He’s called Iraqi civilians “vermin” and called U.S.
Marines held in American custody in connection with the slaughter at Haditha “prisoners of war.”45 In May 2004, Savage commended the abuse of
prisoners at Abu Ghraib, repeatedly referring to it as “Grab-an-Arab” prison.
He argued that their treatment by U.S. guards was not torture but merely humiliation and “we need more of the humiliation tactics, not less”: “These
people don’t fear death, they fear humiliation. The only way to humiliate
them is take their deepest fear, the pig, the dog, the woman with the leash,
and use it on them to break them!”46
Ann Coulter
Not having a radio or television program of her own has not kept controversial pundit Ann Coulter out of the media spotlight. A conservative political
commentator whose fame initially derived from a variety of print media, she
has parlayed her celebrity status into invitations to appear on other conservative radio and television talk programs, on which the extremity of her
opinions and language drew startled attention from fans and critics alike.
Coulter’s most notorious comment concerning the war on terror was published in her column in the National Review immediately after 9/11, in which
she suggested that the U.S. invade Muslim countries, kill their leaders and
convert them to Christianity. Three years later, Coulter wrote: “I am often
asked if I still think we should invade their countries, kill their leaders, and
convert them to Christianity. The answer is: Now more than ever!”47 This
has proved to be an influential remark; Savage alludes to it and applauds its
sentiments when he says, “In fact, Christianity has been one of the great salvations on planet Earth. It’s what’s necessary in the Middle East. Others have
written about it, I think these people need to be forcibly converted to Christianity.”48 Continuing, Savage explicitly links what he perceives as the Middle East’s non-human status to its not being Christian; forcible conversion,
he says, is “the only thing that can probably turn them into human beings.”49
If Muslims don’t have human status, they neither require nor deserve human rights. Perhaps this is why Coulter feels free to denigrate them, writing
that collectively they have a “predilection for violence” and that “Islam is a
car-burning cult.”50 She urges deportation for Arabs and Muslims, suggesting
that “Congress could pass a law requiring that all aliens from Arabic countries
leave . . . Congress could certainly pass a law requiring all aliens to get ap-
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proval from the INS before boarding an airplane in the United States.”51 Muslims who want to avoid deportation, she says, could prove their loyalty by spying on their fellow citizens.52 These appeals are neither veiled, euphemistic
nor encoded; indeed, her language is deliberately provocative. Far from marginalizing her, this seems to further her popularity: her column for the Universal Press Syndicate appears in more than one hundred newspapers across
the U.S., and she is a legal affairs correspondent for the conservative newspaper Human Events as well as a frequent guest on many TV shows, including
Hannity and Colmes, Wolf Blitzer Reports, At Large With Geraldo Rivera, Scarborough Country, HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher, The O’Reilly Factor, and
Good Morning America. She has been profiled in numerous publications, including TV Guide, the Guardian (UK), the New York Observer, National Journal, Harper’s Bazaar, and Elle magazine, among others. In 2001, she was named
one of the top 100 Public Intellectuals by federal judge Richard Posner. Coulter’s five books have all appeared on the New York Times bestseller list and
have sold more than a million copies in hardcover sales.53 “Every single book
she has done has become an instant best-seller,” says Bob Wietrak, a vicepresident for merchandising at Barnes and Noble: “Her fan base is phenomenal and she is in the media constantly. When she is in the media, it creates
more media coverage. And every single day, the book sells more.”54 This notoriety is profitable: Coulter is listed with the Premiere Speakers Bureau as
available for conferences with a speaking fee of $25,000 per appearance.
While Coulter is vilified by her critics and, in recent years, several newspapers have stopped publishing her column, she still has enormous support.
The media watchdog organization Media Matters For America found that
while many newspapers received thousands of letters and emails protesting
her column, those supporting her won the day. The Clarion-Ledger of Jackson, Mississippi, stated that it would continue to run Coulter’s column despite receiving about 3,000 negative e-mails. Clark Walworth, editor of the
Casper Star-Tribune, said that his newspaper would continue to run Coulter’s
column despite “dozens” of messages urging him to drop it; Walworth wrote
that “lots of Wyoming conservatives relish” Coulter’s diatribes. The managing editor of the Elko Daily Free Press in Nevada stated “As of this morning
we had received nearly 60 phone calls or faxes, and about nine out of 10
wanted us to keep running Ann Coulter.”55 She has also received awards for
her work: in 2000 the Media Research Center presented Coulter with its
“Conservative Journalist of the Year” award; the Clare Boothe Luce Policy
Institute bestowed upon her its annual conservative leadership award “for her
unfailing dedication to truth, freedom and conservative values and for being
an exemplar, in word and deed, of what a true leader is.”56
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It is not only right-wing associations that have offered Coulter a platform.
Mainstream news programs, including MSNBC and USA Today, have hired
and eventually fired her, but have continued to provide her space on the airwaves. Hosts on CNN describe her as “downright hateful” while advertising
their upcoming interviews with her, rewarding her for her notoriety and
cashing in on her controversiality.57 Her public persona seems well crafted for
the cultivation of continued controversy; David Carr wrote in the New York
Times that “seeing hate speech pop out of a blonde who knows her way
around a black cocktail dress makes for compelling viewing. . . . You can accuse her of cynicism all you want, but the fact that she is one of the leading
political writers of our age says something about the rest of us.”58
Consequences
Millions of Americans and, thanks to streaming audio, people around the
world, tune in for a daily diet of right-wing talk radio that is overwhelmingly
racist, homophobic, and anti-immigrant. What does the popularity of such
shows say about us? How are our attitudes and social policies affected by these
influential platforms? “Talk radio can be one of the most divisive mediums in
the nation,” says Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting’s (FAIR) Steve Rendall.
“Some of these shows, to a greater or lesser degree, engage in kinds of bigotry
by saying things like, ‘These peaceniks are traitors’ [or] ‘These black people
are undermining our society,’ and they are bound to find some resonance
with some listeners.”59 A report from the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center confirmed, after a year of studying political
call-in radio, that many journalists identify conservative talk radio as “a discordant perhaps dangerous discourse that is intolerant and histrionic, unmindful of evidence, [and] classically propagandistic,” and that it dangerously
spread the kind of hate and divisiveness that led to the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.”60
Part of their influence can be found in the appeal of their confident, vehement and straight-forward message. As our lives become more complex, we
may search for reassuring simplicity in the messages from our media. As our
lives become more hurried, we may look for news that is presented quickly and
in a way that demands less of our own interpretive skills. Limbaugh, O’Reilly,
Savage and Coulter all offer us a clear framework through which we can understand events, and talk radio that does not distinguish between news and
opinion pre-interprets events for us so we don’t have to. A broad range of
ideas can be re-framed through these interpretations: there is one “patriotic”
way to think; the rest are traitors. Inflammatory rhetoric seems to encourage
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us to loathe others’ ideas rather than disagree with them, and hate speech encourages us to loathe not just ideas but the people who hold them.
One reason that this transference of hatred from ideas to people deserves
careful attention is that it can be linked to real action. Especially in times of
threat or hardship, hate speech can mobilize action. One example occurred
in Kalispell, Montana, where a local talk show host on KGEZ began a tirade
against environmentalists and conservationists, blaming them for the loss of
forestry and aluminum industry jobs in the community. Verbally linking
them to al-Qaeda, he read out their names and addresses on air, calling them
“Green Nazis” and blaming them for the town’s economic downturn. The
people whose names were broadcast found their cars vandalized and received
harassing phone calls. When some concerned residents spoke out against the
attack by the radio host they, too, were named on-air and became in turn targets of abuse. Law enforcement officials were contacted and urged to look at
the harassment in a broader context. A direct link was found between the
harassment and the broadcasts. Each incident alone could seem insignificant
but, for the community being targeted, there was a cumulative effect. Ken
Toole, program director of the Human Rights Network, noted that “we believe [the incidents] point to a pattern of escalating tension which may result
in more serious criminal activity.”61
The situation in Montana prompted the Human Rights Network to document the impact of talk radio and its ability to elicit violence. One effect of
the dominance of hate-filled talk on-air is that listeners tend to be confirmed
in their existing opinions, and may generalize these opinions beyond their
own experience. The “ugly rhetoric may change,” observes journalist Ken
Olsen, reflecting “anti-Hispanic bias in the Southwest, anti-gay slurs in the
Northeast, anti-Arab bias in the Midwest,” but “the fact remains: There are
a phenomenal number of no-holds-barred hosts pounding their bullying pulpits on talk radio.”62 The public broadcasting of hate speech, especially when
it is not balanced by dissenting opinion, gives it a patina of legitimacy and
respectability. University of Washington communications professor David
Domke asks, “Does talk radio reinforce stereotypes and prejudice? That’s the
million-dollar question. My take on that is yes.”63
Prosecuting Media Hate Speech
The balance between freedom of speech and moral or legal responsibility is
the source of on-going debate. In the twentieth century there have been
movements towards a greater democratization of media than ever before; at
the same time, media voices also have been publicly held to account for their
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role in fomenting hatred. The most famous of these international accountings were the Nuremberg Trials following World War II, in which judges from
Allied countries tried twenty-two Nazi leaders on charges of conspiracy for
crimes against peace, planning wars of aggression, war crimes, and crimes
against humanity. One of those prosecuted was Julius Streicher, founder and
editor of the anti-Jewish publication Der Stuermer and publisher of anti-Jewish children’s books. Founded in 1923, Der Stuermer’s editorials blamed the
Jews for Germany’s economic depression, unemployment, and inflation. It
was Streicher’s active role as editor that brought him before prosecutors at
Nuremberg. In convicting him, judges considered Streicher’s role in advocating genocide against the Jews, including his admonition, published in
May 1939, that “A punitive expedition must come against the Jews in Russia. A punitive expedition which will provide the same fate for them that
every murderer and criminal must expect. Death sentence and execution.
The Jews in Russia must be killed . . . exterminated root and branch.”64
While Streicher did not physically participate in killing Jews, he repeatedly
encouraged their annihilation; based on this, the court found him guilty of
crimes against humanity and he was executed in 1946. Streicher’s case exemplifies the limits of free speech and the legal culpability that may be in involved in inciting violence. The Nuremberg Trials made it clear that individuals can be held liable in an international court if their country is charged
with war crimes. Provocative parallels might be drawn between Streicher
and modern-day political pundits who profit by encouraging attacks on Islam. If, as studies have shown, such messages can influence people’s attitudes
and may invoke violence against a demonized group, then should not the historical precedents of the Nuremberg Trials create a sense of caution in those
who think that extermination may be urged with impunity?
A more recent example of prosecution connected to hate speech and incitement to violence can be found at the 1994 International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda that brought to trial the leaders of the one-hundred-day
frenzy of violence that resulted in the deaths of nearly one million Rwandans. Prior to colonization the Hutu and Tutsi, the two main ethnic groups
of Rwanda, lived peaceably together. Under Belgian colonial rule, local governing powers were granted to the Tutsis based on findings from the thenpopular eugenics movement in Europe: scientists deemed Tutsis superior
based on larger skull size and a lighter skin color compared to the shorter,
darker Hutus, features which hinted at superior Caucasian ancestry. Under
Belgian colonial rule, each citizen was issued an identification card defining
citizens as legally Hutu or Tutsi. This emphasis on racial division helped lay
the groundwork for the conflicts between Hutu and Tutsis that erupted in the
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latter years of the twentieth century, triggered by the assassination of the
country’s Hutu president on April 6, 1994. Believing Tutsis to be responsible,
Hutu extremists began to systematically murder Tutsi and moderate Hutu in
retaliation. They whipped up genocidal sentiments against the Tutsi, encouraging other Hutus to join in the slaughter. According to Philip Gourevitch, “The dead of Rwanda accumulated at nearly three times the rate of
Jewish dead during the Holocaust.”65 In one hundred days, approximately
800,000 people were killed, although some estimates are as high as one million. The United Nations’ International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
(ICTR) was created in 1994 to prosecute those responsible.
Among those brought to trial were three Rwandan journalists: Hassan
Ngeze, editor-in-chief of Kangura, and Ferdinand Nahimana and Jean-Bosco
Barayagwiza, founders of Radio-Television Libre des Milles Collines
(RTLM). Prior to the genocide, both the radio station and newspaper carried
virulent propaganda, repeatedly referring to Tutsis as serpents and cockroaches. The November 1991 issue of Kangura contained the ominous message, “What arms shall we use to conquer the Inyenzi (cockroaches) once and
for all?” “Let whatever is smoldering erupt,” Ngeze urged in his paper days before the genocide began, adding “a lot of blood will be poured.”66 Once the
massacre began in the spring of 1994, the RTLM not only broadcast direct
calls to violence but included the names and addresses of Tutsi targets to facilitate their murders.
The trial provided a further example of the media’s liability for the violence it incited through the spread of hate. It judged inciting media voices as
guilty of crimes against humanity as those wielding the machetes. Ngeze,
Nahimana, and Barayagwiza were all found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment. Head prosecutor Hassan Bubacar Jallow observed that “This tribunal has set an important precedent that says if the media in this day and
age uses their power to attack an ethnic group or racial group, they will have
to face justice.”67
Freedom and Responsibility
The Nuremberg Trials and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda
clearly regarded certain media voices as participants in war crimes. Their hate
speech was seen as complicit in the violent acts they urged on in others.
When contemporary right-wing commentators make statements suggesting
that all Arabs and Muslims should be killed when Arabs and Muslims are, indeed, being massacred by U.S. and Allied forces, could they be at risk of being charged with war crimes if America were indicted for its illegal occupation
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of Iraq? Would parent companies, newspaper editors, and radio stations be
held accountable for distributing, producing, and publishing suspect content?
Would Disney, owner of the American Broadcasting Network whose radio
stations carry Limbaugh’s and Savage’s programs, find its family-friendly image jeopardized by a charge of crimes against humanity?
Under current legal definitions, the utterances of Coulter, Limbaugh, Savage and their colleagues fall short of the requirements for prosecution under
the UN’s Genocide convention. Other international legal agreements and
UN conventions, however, contain articles applicable to inciting hatred, especially in times of war. Article 19 of the United Nations’ International
Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) stipulates that everyone
shall have the right to freedom of expression but that this freedom is subject
to restrictions pertaining to the rights or reputations of others, national security, and public health or morals. Article 20 prohibits any propagandistic
advocacy of national, racial or religious hatred that incites discrimination,
hostility or violence. While the UN provides guidelines and urges compliance, the articles are not legally binding and enforcement is voluntary for
states signing the Covenant. The U.S. is one of the signatories to the ICCPR
but added a formal exemption stating that its constitutionally protected right
to freedom of speech and association override the provisions of the
Covenant. Making the issue more difficult, the existing ICCPR definitions
for war and propaganda are so vague that they could describe a wide range of
comments. Doug Cassel, Director of the Center for International Human
Rights, argues that the ICCPR’s definition of propaganda as “factual exaggeration” and “overly-simplistic value judgements” could be applicable to the
utterances of many politicians, American and otherwise, and would make
them guilty of disseminating propaganda. The better option, says Cassel, is
not to criminalize hate speech and violence-inciting language, but to publically and collectively denounce them.
In June 2006, the United Nations Human Rights Commission issued a report sharply critical of the U.S. government’s failure to enforce the protections provided under the Covenant. The Report on Failure of Compliance with
Article 20 Prohibiting Propaganda for War expresses concern over American violations, noting that “The U.S. government has sought to justify its actions
and policies on the basis of the ‘war on terror’ and the exigencies of its illegal war in Iraq” but does not acknowledge the role of public propaganda campaigns in stoking fear and xenophobia and supporting the resulting illegal
war. The UN Report argued that propaganda and hate campaigns contributed to violations of many other rights protected by the Covenant.68
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The U.S. has insisted it will take no action contrary to its constitutional
provisions for freedom of speech and association. It is worth noting, however,
that the First Amendment protects the rights of citizens rather than countries;
since governments are the signatories to the Covenant, they are the ones responsible for enforcement of Article 20. The UN Report contains arguments
refuting U.S. claims that First Amendment rights supersede the Covenant.
Freedom of speech, it states, is not absolute: federal courts, for example, have
ruled that incitement is exempt from First Amendment protection. Not only
did Bush’s administration actively propagate unsubstantiated claims (such as
Saddam Hussein’s putative involvement in the 9/11 attacks and the existence
of infamous, still undiscovered weapons of mass destruction) to justify its attack on Iraq, but many officials made these claims knowing they were not substantiated. Dissenting views within government and intelligence communities were ignored, sanctioned, or punished by an administration which
continues to use propaganda to justify future pre-emptive attacks on other
countries, such as Iran. As a result, the UN considers the U.S. to be in contravention of the ICCPR. There appears to be a potent gap between the U.S.
government’s belief in the sanctity of free speech and association and the international covenant that prohibits war propaganda. Through its allegiance to
free speech, the government protects itself from culpability before international courts by invoking the Constitution. Freedom of speech, however, does
not belong only to the loudest or most vocal speaker; it is also the right of
those most actively silenced by hate speech and propaganda. As Cees
Hamelink, of the University of Amsterdam, puts it, “You have to choose between two evils—the evil of limiting freedom of speech on the one hand, and
allowing incitement of violence on the other hand. Persons who propagate
hate speech take away their victim’s right of free speech.”69
International Hate Speech Laws
Several countries have devised hate speech laws more restrictive than those of
the United States. The Criminal Code of Canada, for example, prohibits the
expression of hatred or the advocacy of genocide based on color, race, religion,
ethnic origin, or sexual orientation. Individuals can be arrested for public comments so hateful they are likely to provoke violence against others, even if no
violence occurs. In 2002, Sweden, motivated by the hate speech of a neo-Nazi
group, passed a bill criminalizing hate speech. Britain’s Serious Organised Crime
and Police Bill includes protection from racial hate speech. Like Sweden, Australia bans certain types of hate speech with no exemption for religious speech.
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In 2001, the Australian state of Victoria passed a bill, the Racial and Religious
Tolerance Act, making it illegal to incite hatred based on religion or race. In
contrast to such laws in other countries, as the U.S. government engages in war
propaganda in violation of international treaties, using the First Amendment
as its justification, it can hardly restrict American media from making similar,
if greatly exaggerated, statements regarding enemies of the state. While the
Fairness Doctrine at least maintained a greater diversity of viewpoints on the
public airwaves, its demise has allowed for a hyperbolic right-wing frenzy ensuring a perpetual open season on minorities and liberals, groups bearing the
brunt of much of the hate speech generated in by right-wing conservative commentators. When Kathryn Ruud analyzes the metaphors and language used by
talk-radio hosts to describe liberals, she finds it disturbingly similar to “the language of Hitler’s genocidal machine,” an extremity of speech used to confirm
and denigrate difference.70
The issue of free speech is a contentious one, as York University professor
Evelyn Kallen demonstrates. There are, she notes, two groups dominating
the debate: those who argue that freedom of speech is without check or limit,
and those who argue that freedom of speech does not protect the right to vilify others.71 The latter group argues that the threat posed by hate speech is
urgent enough to require limits on free speech.
Re-Framing the Debate: From Freedom of
Speech to the Voices of Our Friends
One way out of the polarities of the free speech versus hate speech debate is
to reject state-mandated limitations to speech and to call instead for heightened and mobilized public resistance to the rise of hate. Its prevalence on
our public airwaves has conspired to make it appear, by virtue of its endless
recirculation, somehow less shocking. Those who can’t bear to hear it turn
the channel; those who listen are often so blunted by its vehemence that
they tune out its most pernicious expressions. Instead, we need to challenge
the erroneous, irresponsible assumptions of hate speakers as fervently as they
are disseminated. While we defend freedom of speech, we must rally our creative energies to find solutions other than the blunt one of censorship. We
must be as ingenious as the teenagers of Palatine, Illinois, who, when the local Ku Klux Klan announced its plan to register for the state’s Adopt-aHighway program, showed up in a flood at City Hall and filled in so many
applications for the program that the Klan chapter’s application was pushed
onto a waiting list. We must be as bold as the town of Pulaski, Tennessee,
which in 1989 closed its doors to white supremacists when members of the
HateSpeak 147
KKK and Aryan Nation attempted to rally there. When they arrived, the
town was closed: there were no open stores, restaurants, bathrooms, or public areas available. Instead, the Klan found the town draped in orange banners, the international color of brotherhood.72 Such united community responses fight hatred with empathy and bigotry with compassion. The need
to combat hatred—whether directed at those of other races, religious beliefs, or sexual orientation—brings people together in creative ways. In contrast, conservative talk radio appears to succeed only in uniting like-minded
people who view difference as a threat and are not outraged by calls for the
annihilation of a country’s population. If the hosts of these programs used
their medium’s impressive ability to mobilize public sentiment towards creating a more harmonious society, instead of an increasingly divisive, fearful,
and intolerant one, there would be even more examples like these. “Somehow,” says the University of Washington’s Margaret Gordon, “we have to
reawaken the American public and have them be more demanding about
the information coming their way.”73 Part of this re-awakening involves
holding both ourselves and our media to higher standards: we must demand
nuance over simplicity, contexts over slogans. We must challenge misinformation and deception, reveal narrowness of thought, expose distortion. If
speakers like Coulter offer us, as author Jane Smiley insists, a constant “test
of our humanity,”74 we fail that test when we do not say no to speech that
offers only the morbidly fascinating lure of its rage and bitterness. Instead,
we might exercise a different brand of freedom, and freely choose to stop
buying the books, stop listening to the programs, and vocally repudiate our
role as hatred’s complicit witness.
Notes
1. Sidney Blumenthal. “The right wing’s summer of hate.” Salon. August 15, 2003.
See dir.salon.com/story/opinion/feature/2003/08/15/hate/index.html (July 3, 2007).
2. Yigal Carmon. “Option Paper: Creating Awareness: Education, Media and
Memory.” Stockholm International Forum. January 26–28, 2004. See www.manskligara
ttigheter.gov.se/stockholmforum/2004/page1589.html (July 3, 2007).
3. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Understanding Words That Wound. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2004: 16.
4. Todd Gitlin quoted in Brad Kava. “Experts predict move to civility on talk radio after Imus firing.” San Jose Mercury News. April 13, 2007.
5. Sidney Blumenthal. “The right wing’s summer of hate.”
6. Ken Olsen. “Does Talk Radio Incite Hate?” Tolerance.org. April 25, 2003. See
www.tolerance.org/news/article_tol.jsp?id=752 (July 3, 2007).
7. Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Understanding Words That Wound.
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8. PEW study cited in Project for Excellence in Journalism. “The State of the News
Media.” 2007. Project for Excellence in Journalism. See www.stateofthenewsmedia.org
/2007/narrative_radio_talk_radio.asp (July 3, 2007).
9. Joshua Holland. “The Structural Imbalance of Political Talk Radio.” alternet
.org. June 29, 2007. See alternet.org/mediaculture/55269/?comments=view&cID=
686257&pID=686181 (July 3, 2007).
10. Talkers Magazine. “Top Talk Personalities.” Talkers Magazine. June 2007. See
www.talkers.com/main/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=17&Itemid=
34 (July 3, 2007).
11. Ted Gregory. “Right and wrong; Rush Limbaugh critics want to set the facts
straight, but it’s not easy.” Chicago Tribune. August 18, 1995.
12. Talkers Magazine. “The 25 Greatest Radio Talk Show Hosts of All Time.” September 2002.
13. Dan Weil. “Limbaugh’s New Radio Contract Worth $285 Million.” The Palm
Beach Post. July 20, 2001.
14. Lea Goldman. “The Celebrity 100.” Forbes. July 3, 2006.
15. Media Research Center. “Rush Limbaugh to accept media excellence award at
MRC 20th anniversary gala.”Media Research Center. March 20, 2007. See www.media
research.org/press/2007/press20070320.asp (July 30, 2007).
16. Margaret Carlson. “Public Eye.” Time. Jan. 23, 1995.
17. Jeff Cohen and Steve Rendall. “Can a Man Who Has a Problem with People
of Color Be a Color Commentator On ‘Monday Night Football’?” Los Angeles Times.
June 7, 2000.
18. Paul de Rooij. “Glossary of the Iraqi Occupation.” Dissident Voice. April 29,
2004. See www.dissidentvoice.org/April2004/DeRooij0429.htm (July 3, 2007).
19. Paul de Rooij. “Glossary of the Iraqi Occupation.”
20. Kurt Nimmo. “Limbaugh and the Babes of Abu Ghraib.” Counterpunch. May
8–9, 2004. See www.counterpunch.org/nimmo05082004.html (July 3, 2007).
21. Kurt Nimmo. “Limbaugh and the Babes of Abu Ghraib.”
22. Bryon York. “A New Attack on Rush.” The National Review on line. May 28 2004.
See www.nationalreview.com/york/york200405280844.asp (July 3, 2007).
23. Bryon York. “A New Attack on Rush.”
24. Bill O’Reilly. “Newspaper Column List.” BillOReilly.com. January 8, 2007. See
www.billoreilly.com/pg/jsp/general/newspapercolumn.jsp (July 3, 2007).
25. Random House. “Author profile: Bill O’Reilly.” See www.randomhouse.com
/author/results.pperl?authorid=22596 (July 3, 2007).
26. Lea Goldman. “The Celebrity 100.”
27. Sidney Blumenthal. “The right wing’s summer of hate.”
28. Mike Conway and Maria Grabe. “Content analysis of O’Reilly’s rhetoric finds
spin to be a ‘factor’.” Indiana University Press Release. (May 2, 2007). See newsinfo
.iu.edu/news/page/normal/5535.html (July 3, 2007).
29. O’Reilly: Iraqi people are “primitive,” “prehistoric group.” Fri, Jun 18, 2004 at
4:44 P.M. EST. See mediamatters.org/items/200406180005
HateSpeak 149
30. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. “Media Pundits Advocate Civilian Targets.”
FAIR. September 21, 2001. See www.fair.org/index.php?page=1675 (July 10, 2007).
31. FAIR. “Media Pundits Advocate Civilian Targets.”
32. Thomas Wheeler. “O’Reilly’s Final Solution.” Z. June 22, 2004. See www.zmag
.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemID=5753 (July 10, 2007).
33. Rayan El-Amine. “The Making of the Arab Menace.” Left Turn. May 1, 2005.
See www.leftturn.org/?q=node/345 (July 3, 2007).
34. Thomas Wheeler. “O’Reilly’s Final Solution.”
35. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. “Savage Homophobia on MSNBC.” July 7,
2003. See www.fair.org/index.php?page=1621 (July 10, 2007).
36. Sidney Blumenthal. “The right wing’s summer of hate.”
37. John Lillpop. “Michael Savage Honored With Prestigious Freedom of Speech
Award!” Canada Free Press. March 28, 2007. See www.canadafreepress.com/2007
/lillpop032807.htm (July 3, 2007).
38. Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. “Iraq and the Media.” March 19, 2007. See
www.fair.org/index.php?page=3062 (July 10, 2007).
39. Associated Press. “Evidence suggests Haditha killings deliberate: Pentagon
source.” August 2, 2006.
40. Media Matters for America. “Savage called Iraqi witnesses of alleged Haditha
massacre ‘vermin’ and ‘scum,’ proclaimed detained Marines are American ‘POWs’.”
June 9, 2006. See mediamatters.org/items/200606090010 (July 3, 2007).
41. Media Matters for America. “Savage: Israel must ensure ‘nothing is left living in
Southern Lebanon’ and must ‘free itself of the men . . . act[ing] like Holocaust Jews
hiding in the sewer’.” Jul 31, 2006. See mediamatters.org/items/200607310004 (July
3, 2007).
42. Media Matters for America. “Savage Nation: It’s not just Rush; Talk radio host
Michael Savage: ‘I commend’ prisoner abuse; ‘we need more’.” May 13, 2004. See
mediamatters.org/items/200405130004 (July 3, 2007).
43. Media Matters for America. “Savage Nation: It’s not just Rush.”
44. Media Matters for America. “Savage: ‘Use a bunker-buster bomb on the U.N.’”
July 24, 2006. See mediamatters.org/items/200607240007 (July 3, 2007).
45. Media Matters for America. “Savage called Iraqi witnesses of alleged Haditha
massacre.”
46. Media Matters for America. “Savage Nation: It’s not just Rush; Talk radio host
Michael Savage: ‘I commend’ prisoner abuse; ‘we need more’.” May 13, 2004. See
mediamatters.org/items/200405130004 (July 3, 2007).
47. Ann Coulter. How to Talk to a Liberal (If You Must). New York City: Crown
Publishing Group, 2004.
48. Media Matters for America. “Savage: Arabs are ‘non-humans’ and ‘racist, fascist
bigots’.” May 14, 2004. See mediamatters.org/items/200405140003 (July 3, 2007).
49. Media Matters for America. “Savage: Arabs are ‘non-humans’”
50. Media Matters for America. “Islam is ‘a car-burning cult.’” February 10, 2006.
See mediamatters.org/items/200602100003 (July 3, 2007).
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51. Washington Monthly. “The Wisdom of Ann Coulter.” October 2001. See www
.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0111.coulterwisdom.html (July 10, 2007).
52. Washington Monthly. “The Wisdom of Ann Coulter.”
53. David Carr. “Deadly Intent: Ann Coulter, Word Warrior.” New York Times.
June 12, 2006.
54. David Carr. “Deadly Intent.”
55. Media Matters for America. “Citing reader support, several papers will keep
publishing Coulter.” March 12, 2007. See mediamatters.org/items/200703120010
(July 4, 2007).
56. Washington Monthly. “The Wisdom of Ann Coulter.” October 2001. See www
.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/0111.coulterwisdom.html (July 10, 2007).
57. Media Matters for America. “Coulter’s reward for her ‘downright hateful’ comments: another appearance on CNN!” March 5, 2007. See mediamatters.org/items
/200703050003 (July 4, 2007).
58. David Carr. “Deadly Intent.”
59. Ken Olsen. “Does Talk Radio Incite Hate?” Tolerance.org. April 25, 2003. See
www.tolerance.org/news/article_tol.jsp?id=752 (July 3, 2007).
60. Joseph Cappella, Joseph Turow, and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. “Call-In Political Talk Radio: Background, Content, Audiences, Portrayal in Mainstream Media.”
University of Pennsylvania Annenberg Public Policy Center. July 22, 1996.
61. Ken Olsen. “Does Talk Radio Incite Hate?”
62. Ken Olsen. “Does Talk Radio Incite Hate?”
63. Ken Olsen. “Does Talk Radio Incite Hate?”
64. Trial Watch. “Julius Streicher.”See www.trial-ch.org/en/trial-watch/profile/db
/facts/julius_streicher_22.html; and, motlc.wiesenthal.com/site/pp.asp?c=gvKVLc
MVIuG&b =395155 (July 4, 2007).
65. Philip Gourevitch. We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our
families: Stories from Rwanda. New York City: Picador, 1998.
66. Charity Kagwi-Ndungu. “The challenges in prosecuting print media for incitement to genocide.” International Development Research Centre. See www.idrc.ca/fr
/ev-108292-201-1-DO _TOPIC.html (July 10, 2007). Document(s) 34 de 37.
67. Emily Wax. “Journalists Sentenced In Rwanda Genocide. Prosecutor Said
‘Hate Media’ Urged Killings.” Washington Post Foreign Service. December 4, 2003.
68. Media Matters for America. “Help Stop Conservative Hate Speech on Public Airwaves.” August 24, 2005. See mediamatters.org/items/200508240007 (July 4, 2007).
69. Ernst-Jan Pfauth. “When Hate Speech Turns Deadly, Who Can Stop It?” InterPress Service News Agency (IPS). Apr 13, 2007. See ipsnews.net/news.asp?idnews=
37345 (July 4, 2007).
70. Kathryn Ruud. “Liberal parasites and other creepers: Rush Limbaugh, Ken
Hamblin, and the discursive construction of group identities.” In At War With Words.
Mirjana Dedaic and Daniel Nelson (Eds). Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003: 27–62.
71. Evelyn Kallen. “Hate on the Net: A Question of Rights/A Question of Power.”
Electronic Journal of Sociology. 1998. See www.sociology.org/content/vol003.002/kallen
.html (July 4, 2007).
HateSpeak 151
72. Joseph Cappella and Joseph Turow, Kathleen Hall. “Call-In Political Talk Radio: Background, Content, Audiences, Portrayal in Mainstream Media. University of
Pennsylvania Annenberg Public Policy Center. July 22, 1996.
73. Ken Olsen. “Does Talk Radio Incite Hate?”
74. Jane Smiley. “All-American Hate Speech.” The Huffington Post. June 7, 2006.
See www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-smiley/allamerican-hate-speech_b_22463.html
(July 4, 2007).
P A R T
T H R E E
DANGEROUS DISCOURSES
C H A P T E R
S E V E N
Media March to War:
Understanding News Filters
If you’re not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people
who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.
—Malcolm X
Media Propaganda and Dehumanization
Since 9/11, mainstream media have consistently used metaphor to present
terrorists, those suspected of terrorism, and even civilians linked through religion, culture, or ethnicity to countries associated with terrorism, as inhuman, non-human, or sub-human. Metaphoric language has called, openly or
subtly, for indiscriminate violence and extermination. In the way that it
serves and reproduces government interests, this propaganda is a far cry from
the principles of responsible investigative reporting. As New York Times
columnist Anthony Lewis memorably phrased it, “Journalism’s high purpose
is not to get close to power but to speak truth to power.”1 In order to understand the media’s role in constructing and reproducing racist propaganda
about the war on terror and its willingness to uncritically apply largely unexamined metaphoric frames, it is necessary to understand the context of contemporary monopoly media in which powerful political and economic forces
significantly shape the content of the daily news. Understanding the monopoly culture in which media operates is crucial, given the complex interplay between media producers, sponsors, and viewers. As Norman Fairclough
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observes, media is socially significant because of its cumulative effect, as are
the controls and contexts of media production. While the influence of what
Fairclough calls “power-holders” on a single text can be negligible, the “effects of media power are cumulative, working through particular ways of handling causality and agency” and “particular ways of positioning the reader.”
Because of this repetitive, cumulative effect, “media discourse is able to exercise a pervasive and powerful influence in social reproduction.”2 Understanding the sources and operations of what cultural critic bell hooks calls
media’s “motivated representation”3 allows us to discern the links between
media contexts and real-world consequences, consequences that are critical
to national, even global safety.
When studying media effects, it is tempting to emphasize the audience’s
passivity and impressionability. Media are often portrayed as a top-down
structure with audience opinion and understanding directly shaped by the selection of stories offered, the amount of coverage provided, and over-reliance
on the media’s objectivity and professional distance. Far from being passive,
however, viewers and listeners are active participants in media’s creation of
symbols and meanings. This is particularly evident in media coverage of the
developing world and disadvantaged groups, all of which are linked to stories
about the war on terror.
While media content and audience response are inextricably linked phenomena, media portrayals are undeniably influential, especially when they
are seen as neutral and unbiased. Greg Philo suggests that providing news
coverage without any related or contextualizing discussion distinctly shapes
audience understanding of a story.4 In the war on terror, for example, neocolonial assumptions regularly skew the underlying interpretation of stories.
Neo-colonialism, in which economic and political means are used by a major power to maintain or extend its influence on underdeveloped nations,
shapes news stories from the Global South, for instance, which is overwhelmingly presented as primitive or backward, populated by people portrayed as savage, mindless, or violent. The audience consuming this information comes to regard conflicts in the developing world as disconnected
from their own social, political, and commercial lives. Events in the developing world are seen as stemming from corrupt leaders and a primitive citizenry, resulting in a perspective that assumes “It’s their own fault.” Since
problems are portrayed as relating to the essential inferiority of the country
and its inhabitants, conflicts are seen as hopeless and inevitable. The treatment of the Other in news media supports Ruth Wodak’s observation that
racism “as both social practice and ideology” tends to “manifest itself discursively.” 5 In particular, many media voices perpetuate neo-colonial portrayals
Media March to War 157
of the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular as culturally primitive.
When an audience brings its own stereotypes to the media’s broader misperceptions, biases are continually reinforced and re-circulated. Together, then,
media, speech writers and journalists share many of these assumptions with
their audience, assumptions reinforced by coverage that is overwhelmingly
negative. Further, the media assume the audience has knowledge of the context and background of news events; when a story is presented it often fails
to provide sufficient historical, political, or cultural background and audiences are left with an unclear understanding of the details or nuances of a
story.
Philo’s findings on the potential dangers of media distortion on audience
understanding have a new-found significance when examining public comprehension of the war on terror. A 2003 study by the University of Maryland’s Program on International Policy shows that a majority of Americans
have “significant misperceptions” about the Iraq war; the frequency of these
misconceptions varied significantly according to the individual’s primary
source of news. People who mostly watched Fox News, for example, were
more likely to have misperceptions than those who primarily turned to NPR
or PBS for coverage.6 Steven Kull, director of PIPA, comments, “While we
cannot assert that these misperceptions created the support for going to war
with Iraq, it does appear likely that support for the war would be substantially
lower if fewer members of the public had these misperceptions.”7
Journalism can, if it chooses, mitigate these misperceptions. One web
posting discusses the work of journalists like The Washington Post’s Anthony
Shadid and author Asne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul. The blogger says
their work “can be seen as attempts to humanize the other by telling you how
similar they are to us. More pointedly, they ‘humanize’ the ‘other’ by endowing them with cultural values that we value and admire—like reading books
or going to theater. . . . The sad fact is,” the writer continues, “it is inconceivable for a lot of Americans to imagine people living in [a] shanty town
among mounds of garbage, with tattered clothes and emaciated bodies, to
have a fully formed emotional life with their own frustrations and aspirations.
It is almost as if these masses are a lower form of life—whose lives are as inconsequential as their deaths are immaterial.”8
This rare journalistic humanizing effect is remarkable for its near-absence
in contemporary media. In the midst of this absence, it is easier to take the
step of dehumanizing and demonizing the Other. Abetting this mind-set, according to media analyst Howard Zinn, is “an even bigger lie: the arrogant
idea that this country is the center of the universe, exceptionally virtuous, admirable, superior.” Zinn argues, “If our starting point for evaluating the world
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around us is the firm belief that this nation is somehow endowed by Providence with unique qualities that make it morally superior to every other nation on Earth,” then “we are not likely to question the President when he says
we are sending our troops here or there, or bombing this or that, in order to
spread our values—democracy, liberty, and let’s not forget free enterprise—to
some God-forsaken (literally) place in the world.”9
Framing and Representation
“The most effective propaganda,” says political analyst Michael Parenti, “relies on framing rather than on falsehood.”10 Parenti examines methods by
which media maintain the appearance of objectivity while actually packaging information in a way that creates a desired impression; Parenti calls this
“bending the truth rather than breaking it.”11 These techniques include the
amount of time the story is covered, where the story is situated in a broadcast, and the story’s tone, headlines, photographs and accompanying visuals.
Furthermore, Parenti points out, “Many things are reported in the news but
few are explained.”12 Ideologically and politically, a story’s deeper aspects are
rarely articulated: “Little is said about how the social order is organized and
for what purposes. Instead we are left to see the world as do mainstream pundits, as a scatter of events and personalities propelled by happenstance, circumstance, confused intentions, bungled operations, and individual ambition—rarely by powerful class interests.”13 The media’s portrayal of news as a
“scatter of events and personalities” is enmeshed not only in frames of ideology, interest, and economics, but in the larger, enduring frame of race. Karim
H. Karim indicts Anglo-American reporting for its stereotyped, dichotomized discourse, which relies on polarizing representations suggesting
“we’re” good and “they’re” bad. Karim also notes the frequency, throughout
western journalism, of loaded language; generalizations of diverse Islamic
states; erroneous interpretations of cultural phenomena; loaded language;
historical and contextual omissions; dehumanizing portrayals and dangerous
analogies.14
These problematic frames are significant because the media provide the
primary lens through which most people view a conflict. Journalists’ choices
of images to focus on, questions to pursue and facts to report or ignore can
have a significant effect on audience comprehension. The news should not
be seen, therefore, as a series of facts or a mirror of external reality but as a
cultural product. Its accounts of the world are produced from within specific
interpretive frameworks. A media frame tells viewers what kind of conflict
they are observing, which sources of information are relevant, what questions
Media March to War 159
to ask, and how to interpret the answers. Mainstream media set the agenda
through their selection of topics, distribution of concerns, emphasis and
framing of issues, filtering of information, and presentation of the debate. As
Noam Chomsky explains, “They determine, they select, they shape, they
control, they restrict,” all in order to “serve the interests of dominant, elite
groups in the society.”15
With emotions running high after 9/11, the media cooperated with government interests by failing to demand answers from the President and the
Secretary of Defense, and by zealously reproducing, often verbatim, government and military directives. Fundamental journalistic principles of objectivity, investigation, and asking tough, probing questions were abandoned.
Gary Kamiya argued that “the real failing was not in any one area; it was
across the board. Bush administration lies and distortions went unchallenged, or were actively promoted,” while “problematic assumptions about
terrorism and the war on terror were rarely debated or even discussed. Vital
historical context was almost never provided.” This wasn’t just, says Kamiya,
a failure of analysis. With “some honorable exceptions, good old-fashioned
reporting was also absent.”16
Media critics point to the lack of historical contexts included in media
coverage of terrorist attacks, and its resistance to offering insight, analysis or
reflection on what might compel a terrorist group to attack for fear of being
accused of justifying, rationalizing, or sympathizing with terrorists. David Edwards states that
The media has consistently denied the public access to authoritative voices
that predicted, and could help explain, the causes of bitter opposition to Western policies in the Middle East. By suppressing these insights, the media is
denying the public access to credible alternatives for ridding the world of terrorism that do not involve the slaughter of untold numbers of people in
Afghanistan and Iraq.17
One example of the media’s neglect of context is the dearth of media
coverage of the U.S.-imposed sanctions in Iraq between the first Gulf War
and the current war in Iraq. Many in the Arab world have grievances
against the U.S. because of its policy towards Iraq: by the UN’s admission,
the sanctions regime contributed to the deaths by illness and starvation of
500,000 Iraqi children. Denis Halliday, former UN Assistant SecretaryGeneral, says that the sanctions were “a deliberate policy to destroy the people of Iraq.”18 But, as Edwards contends, there is little in the media to link
the sanctions to the rise of terrorism or Arab-Muslim anger. One reason,
therefore, to seek understanding of the historical contexts of terrorism is not
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to rationalize or justify it, but to understand rationally its root causes in the
hope that, by addressing them, we can prevent further terrorism.19
We expect that citizens who keep abreast of the news will be educated and
informed with information relevant to understanding critical issues. This
cannot happen when media employs more propaganda than insight, and fosters discourses of hatred that make our world less safe by cementing, through
its coverage, difference and dehumanization.
The Media’s Coverage of the War
Kenneth Payne asserts that contemporary media are “indisputably an instrument of war,” helping governments win “domestic and international public
opinion,” a task as essential to winning modern wars as “defeating the enemy
on the battlefield.”20 Media’s role as an instrument of war, argues Payne is
“true regardless of the aspirations of many journalists to give an impartial and
balanced assessment of conflict.”21 Kamiya and Payne are not alone in their
critical analysis of the media’s dereliction of duty: a study of British news conducted by the University of Manchester found the media most likely to report good news about the coalition forces. Study leader Dr. Piers Robinson
stated that the news media tends to report the official word from coalition
leaders, offering a positive spin on events. “Coverage of the war was narrated
largely through the voice of the coalition with much less attention given to
other actors,” said Robinson. “This suggests that factors such as reliance upon
elite sources, patriotism and news values rooted in episodic coverage continue to be important in shaping war-time coverage.”22
Lies and propaganda, known to journalists and critical observers at the
time, were presented in the press as factual. Amy Goodman, of the American radio and television news program Democracy Now, commented that
U.S. media reached an “all-time low” in failing to reflect mainstream opinion and Americans’ desire for trusted information, instead acting as a “cheerleader” for war.23
One way to implicitly support the war is to suppress publication of civilian death statistics, a topic Western media rarely broaches. While American
and NATO soldiers killed are counted and named, the totals of Iraqis and
Afghans killed by invading forces, insurgent attacks, starvation, displacement, or unexploded ordnance is unreckoned. News media rely on Pentagon
figures for civilian death tolls, but the job of tracking numbers of Iraqi or
Afghan deaths has fallen to independent organizations, who rarely receive
media attention. The British medical journal The Lancet estimated that in
the first year of the Iraq war, 100 000 Iraqis might have died.24 Why does the
Media March to War 161
Western news media have such an aversion to publicizing civilian death tolls
that do not come from the Pentagon, which is loath to report civilian casualties in the first place? Journalist Judith Coburn argues that civilian death
tolls are innately political and that if the media turned its attention to the
scale of human suffering involved in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, support for the war would wane.25 CNN has directed journalists to stress that
U.S. forces do everything in their power to avoid civilian casualties,26 and a
memo circulated at a Florida newspaper warned editors not to print photos
of civilian casualties from Afghanistan or run stories that lead with civilian
deaths on the front page.27 Dave Markland has chronicled the lengths to
which Canadian print media go to portray Canadian military involvement in
Afghanistan positively. When a NATO attack killed scores of villagers, the
Toronto Star and the Globe & Mail both reported the incident and used the
NATO death toll of eleven civilians killed. When it was later discovered that
31 civilians had been killed by NATO forces, only the Globe & Mail printed
a small correction. When Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International issued pointed criticisms of NATO conduct in Afghanistan and the preponderance of civilian casualties, both newspapers neglected to report their criticisms.28
The reality of war is rarely portrayed by mainstream media, and thus fails
to reach a broad audience. These suppressions create distrust: according to a
2005 Gallup poll, only 54 percent of Americans feel the military keeps them
properly informed, and only 61 percent feel the same about the media. More
than 75 percent of respondents said that the military provides false or inaccurate information to the media.29 This indicates a high level of public distrust; given the under-reporting of important issues that run counter to the
interests of the U.S. government and military, perhaps such skepticism is not
surprising.
The peace movement is also subject to media under-reporting. Since September 2001, universities, trade unions, faith groups, NGOs and peace
groups have mobilized against the war in Afghanistan and Iraq, forming the
biggest anti-war movement in history.30 An international day of protest on
the eve of the invasion of Iraq drew as many as 30 million protestors in approximately 800 cities around the world.31 Yet, Amy Goodman notes the media’s coverage of the peace movement failed to reflect this; because of the
lack of coverage, the peace movement appeared to be only a fringe movement: “In the lead-up to war, the majority of people were actually against war
and for more inspections and diplomacy,” she said. “In fact, I would say those
opposed to war were not a fringe minority, not even a silent majority, but the
silenced majority, silenced by the corporate media.”32
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Media Filters
Contrary to popular thought, the media is not a window on the world. Media scholars challenge this metaphor as providing a false sense of how news
production really works. While contemporary journalism claims that modern
news media produce an objective, truthful, balanced, neutral account of
events, social scientists identify the prevalence of subjectivity in the media.
Media scholars use the phrase the “manufacture of news” to communicate
its constructed nature; the news business involves a myriad of deliberate decisions about the ordering and placement of stories, selection of sources, use
of language, and tone of headlines. In addition, journalists must contend
with external factors affecting the presentation of the news. “Money and
power,” say Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman in Manufacturing Consent,
can “filter the news, marginalizing dissent and allowing the government and
dominant private interests to get their message across to the public.”33 They
argue that the production of news is affected by a powerful gate-keeping
process which filters out certain issues and opinions. Governments, media
owners, advertisers, key sources, flak, and ideology all shape the news we
consume. As a result, mainstream for-profit news media frequently distort information: instead of a well-researched, balanced account addressing multiple perspectives in neutral language, we often find superficial or one-sided accounts that are closer to propaganda than to journalism.
Governments
There is a surprising degree of government influence on news media. It is
commonly believed that a free press is a cornerstone of democracy and that
only totalitarian governments actively control their national news media.
This is not the case. For example, it was not long after the invasion of Iraq
that the first American casualties occurred. Their bodies were transported on
military planes to the mortuary at Dover Air Force Base. Images of the bodies arriving, however, were censored by a Pentagon ban forbidding publication of photos showing the unloading of military caskets. The ban was first
issued in 1991, following a public-relations disaster for then-President
George H. W. Bush, who was shown on a split screen in a news broadcast
laughing and joking about the swift victory in the U.S. attack on Panama
while, on the other screen, an Air Force transport plane unloaded caskets
bearing the remains of U.S. soldiers killed in the invasion. The visual juxtaposition of the two contrasting images evoked strong public reaction, and
then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney attempted to ensure there would be no
future repetitions. Although news outlets sued the government to lift the
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ban, in 1996 the U.S. Court of Appeals supported it, citing the need to protect the privacy of grieving families. The ban was reissued by the Pentagon
in 2003 during the U.S. invasion of Iraq, prohibiting all photographs of “deceased military personnel returning to or departing” from air bases.
For more than two years, Americans were prevented from seeing photos of
coffins arriving. The government did not want a daily visual montage of the
dead reminding the public of the grim reality of the war and putting generic
death statistics into a more immediate human context. The suppression of
the images was successful until 2004 when Tami Silico, an American cargo
worker for Maytag Aircraft in Kuwait, emailed friends and family back home
and attached a digital photo of flag-draped coffins of American casualties being loaded on a 747. On April 18, 2004, the photo and story appeared on the
front page of the Seattle Times. In the interviews that followed, Silico insisted
she had only intended to show the “dignity, care, and respect” given war casualties in preparation for the final trip back to the U.S; the flood of frontpage photos of military coffins that appeared in dozens of newspapers in the
days following was, she said, an unintended consequence.34 Initially, Silico
was cautioned by her employer not to repeat this action. A few days later,
however, in response to Pentagon communications the company fired both
Silico and her estranged husband who also worked for Maytag Aircraft.
In October 2004, Ralph Begleiter, a University of Delaware journalism
professor and former CNN correspondent, sued the Department of Defense
under the Freedom of Information Act for the release of photographs and
videos of coffins arriving at the air force base.35 The Pentagon maintained it
was simply enforcing the policy implemented in 1991 but six months after
the suit was launched, in April 2005, the Pentagon released more than 700
previously suppressed images of returning American casualties from both the
Iraq and Afghanistan conflicts. This action pre-empted a ruling in the lawsuit and confirmed that images of flag-draped coffins are rightfully part of the
public record.
In Canada, in April 2006 the newly elected Conservative government followed American policy and banned media from covering the return of bodies of soldiers killed in the Canadian mission in Afghanistan. Where previously Canadians had seen broadcast images of the solemn repatriation of its
soldiers killed in Afghanistan, occasions attended by prime ministers, cabinet ministers, generals and the Governor-General, Canadian Prime Minister
Stephen Harper imposed restrictions in order, he said, to respect the privacy
of the soldiers and their families. Military families in Canada and the U.S.,
however, have spoken out forcefully against this. Sean Bruyea, retired Canadian veteran of the 1991 Persian Gulf War, said “The cost of the war should
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always be shown front and center, so we can make informed decisions. We
rely a lot on public support. I would hope Canadians would step up to the
plate to defend us.”36 American Jane Bright, whose son Evan Ashcraft, age
twenty-four, was killed in Iraq on July 24, 2003, told a peace group that
We must put aside the secrecy and the lies and let the American public view
the coffins when they return. How else will America feel the pain that the families such as mine are feeling. Our president may be a war president, but I don’t
believe the American people want an open-ended war based on lies, secrecy
and deceit. Let the media, and the rest of America see the coffins when they
return to U.S. soil. It’s the least we can do. Our children did not live in secrecy,
they should not be shrouded in secrecy upon their passing.37
There is more at stake in government suppression of news coverage than
control of images. Journalists in the field are also affected. Most notably, instead of reporting independently and interviewing their own subjects, correspondents covering the war in Iraq are required by the Pentagon to travel
within military units. This is not entirely new; throughout the twentieth
century, official war correspondents have been employed to cover major military conflicts, including such notables as Ernest Hemingway, Stephen
Crane, and Rudyard Kipling. The “embedding” scheme implemented for the
wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, however, is something unique. In this case,
hand-picked reporters receive military training in order to become conditioned to identify with their assigned units. Unlike war correspondents in the
past, these journalists live and travel with troops; rather than examining
events from the outside, embedded journalists share the life of the soldiers,
which, according to journalistic ethics instructor Aly Colon, “challenges the
journalistic tradition that exhorts reporters to remain detached from those
they cover.”38
During and since the 1991 Gulf War, the White House and the Pentagon
have intensified their media censorship. Journalists were permitted to travel
only in pools escorted by military escorts, and since they were not allowed to
use their own transport, they forfeited their autonomy in being able to track
down and investigate their own stories; instead, they see only what they encounter as part of their officially limited mobility. Many military activities in
Iraq and Afghanistan are off-limits to journalists altogether, and the Defense
Department censors all photos, video footage, and battlefield dispatches. The
Pentagon insists on pre-screening and approving any report involving normally restricted material, and its refusal to approve releases makes newsworthy material off-limits to the journalist. “Off the record” communication between military personnel and journalists was forbidden; the Pentagon insisted
Media March to War 165
that all interviews be on the record, discouraging soldiers from registering criticism or divulging damaging information. This relationship allowed war
crimes committed by the United States and allied forces to be systematically
covered up. For example, every mainstream media outlet repeatedly reported
that U.S. smart bombs had inflicted devastating damage on Iraqi military targets, while sparing civilian lives. Later it was revealed that the vast majority
of the bombs were unguided missiles and that thousands of innocent Iraqi
men, women and children were killed.39
Prior to launching the invasion in 2003, conscious of a deepening public
opposition, war planners and media chiefs cooperated in a sweeping system
of media control, claiming this would provide greater access to frontline war
reporters. Five hundred hand-picked journalists from selected western media
agencies were embedded into U.S. military operations. As the White House
was issuing statements saying it hoped war could be avoided, reporters, photographers, and camera crews were being assigned to military units. In a February 18, 2003 interview, Bryan Whitman, deputy assistant Secretary of Defense for media operations, disclosed some of the motivation behind the
Pentagon’s new system, noting that it allowed them to “protect” information:
“we want to be able to protect that information that is going to determine
the success of an operation, and we don’t want any reporting that’s going to
unnecessarily jeopardize those individuals that are executing that mission.
. . . I also have never met a journalist, particularly one that’s traveling with
that unit, that would have any interest in compromising the mission of the
unit.”40
Critics of this practice, even among other journalists, ask who, in such situations, sets the agenda for the news. The media, however, have generally
buried negative comments. Former CNN correspondent Bernard Shaw says,
“The idea of journalists allowing themselves to be taken under the wing of
the United States military to me is very dangerous. I think journalists who
agree to go with combat units effectively become hostages of the military,
which can control the movements of the journalists and, more importantly,
control their ability when they file their stories.”41 Journalists’ neutrality is
compromised because the military sees them not as non-partisan reporters
but as “force multipliers” selling the war story from the military point of view.
Their close association with the military decreases distance between observer
and observed, interfering with access and openness. While the majority of
the embedded journalists saw themselves as performing a valuable role in the
conflict, critics argued that this came at the expense of their independence.
Army Times staff writer Gina Cavallaro, however, has said that embedded
journalism is not necessarily a “bad thing”: journalists are “relying more on
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the military to get them where they want to go, and as a result, the military
is getting smarter about getting its own story told.”42 Kenneth Payne, however, argues that not only does embedding allow the military “a high degree
of control over which part of the battlefield will receive media coverage,” but
more subtly, it identifies the reporters far too intimately with the people on
whom they’re reporting. There is already, claims Payne, a disposition among
many American journalists to back American soldiers, and “embedding enhances this tendency, by bringing reporters closer to the soldiers of one side
than the other, perhaps to the extent of prompting a subconscious bias in reporting, the product of shared hardships and camaraderie.”43 This journalistic “Stockholm Syndrome,” argues Payne, “is evident even among reporters
who aim for the most scrupulous objectivity.”44
Just as the U.S. media was strongly influenced by government officials trying to shape the news, the same administration officials also had issues with
the way the war on terror was covered elsewhere. In 2003, it was revealed
that the U.S. military staff was paying Iraqi newspapers to publish positive,
upbeat stories about the supposedly improving conditions in Iraq. Although
intended to counter the propaganda presented by Al Jazeera coverage, even
some members of the military opposed having stories “planted” in this manner.45 The stories were penned by U.S. military “psyops” and placed in the
Iraqi newspapers with the help of the Lincoln Group, a civilian defense contractor. Iraqi subcontractors of the Lincoln Group posed as freelance journalists or advertising executives in order to deliver stories to Iraqi media outlets. Pentagon and military officials contend that such “information
operations” are standard practice during wartime, especially when insurgents
and terrorists use the same tactics. However, critics of the psyops campaign
did not see it as so benign. Veteran journalist John J. Schulz, dean of Boston
University’s College of Communications, said that
In the very process of preventing misinformation from another side, they are
creating misinformation through a process that disguises the source for information that is going out. You can’t be creating a model for democracy while
subverting one of its core principles, a free independent press.46
Similar practices occurred in the UK where, we now know, the BBC and
other British media were used by MI-6, the secret intelligence service. In
what they called Operation Mass Appeal, MI-6 agents planted stories about
Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, purportedly hidden in his palaces and
secret underground bunkers.47
The media are dependent upon their official contacts within government
for information and reliable access to those in power. Offending these sources
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with unfavorable news stories could jeopardize this necessary relationship. In
the UK, according to Dave Edwards, “the BBC faithfully echoed government
propaganda in the lead up to the war, and even more so during the war itself.”48 But after receiving complaints from the public, the national broadcaster began to present government actions in Iraq in a more critical light.
Edwards observes, “Because it is so unusual, this improved performance may
have helped attract a disproportionate level of hostility from government
media minders who, given their experience during the assaults on Serbia and
Afghanistan, understandably took media support for granted.”49 Angered,
the Blair government accused the BBC of trying to undermine the British
government by giving undue prominence to opponents of the war. Edwards
argued that its main motive for attacking the network was to recast widespread scepticism of the government as much more limited and based on the
public broadcaster’s bias. “The rewards for subservience and punishment for
dissent,” said Edwards, are “very real and keenly felt.”50
Many governments reward media outlets who support them and punish
those who critique them, by determining who is awarded radio and television
frequencies, government advertising, and access to important military information. Jebediah Reed notes that several of the American media people who
regurgitated the Bush administration’s case for war have been rewarded with
more prominent positions in the media while those who voiced opposition
to the agenda have found their careers in sharp decline.51 Bush’s presidential
aides have effectively silenced serious questioners, like veteran journalist Helen Thomas, by refusing to have the President call on reporters who challenge them. They have established a hierarchy for journalists seeking interviews with administration officials, favoring networks that give the White
House favorable coverage. This is another factor that causes ambitious career
journalists to practice self-censorship.
The Bush administration and U.S. military have been accused of planting
fake news stories, both in Iraq and at home, that have the appearance of
reliable journalism but are, in fact, attempts to influence public opinion
and further their own interests. Video News Releases, or VNRs, are often
used domestically to shape opinion. Mimicking news broadcast format, and
presented by people who look like reporters, the slick, professional, preproduced slots appear to the untrained eye indistinguishable from the news
features produced by the station, when in fact they are funded, created, and
distributed by various branches of the government or by private corporations.
Frank Rich, writing in the New York Times in 2004, termed VNR segments
“infoganda.”52 These releases are often used by local news outlets strapped for
cash and time, and feature “reporters” discussing domestic policy issues surrounding health, social security, or education reform.53
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VNRs are doubly dangerous: either viewers accept them as real news and
are not impartially informed or they assume they can never trust the news because it could be created by those with vested interests. Despite being decried
by many public advocacy, watchdog, and government oversight groups,
VNRs continue to air on news broadcasts without acknowledgment of their
source because of pressure from government, corporate lobbies and the economic imperatives of television stations.
Media Owners
Those who own and operate the mainstream media in the United States
often have connections to corporate or military power that can result in
conflicting interests. Perpetuating the interests of the military and large
corporations can be extremely profitable, especially during wartime. One of
the most obvious examples of this is the ownership of NBC by General
Electric, a company that manufactures parts to many U.S. weapons systems. Whenever NBC features graphics of U.S. military hardware, the
news anchor might unknowingly be participating in an unpaid advertisement for General Electric. Norman Solomon believes this has consequences for mainstream coverage of contemporary U.S. military conflicts.
He argues that
Given the extent of shared sensibilities and financial synergies within what
amounts to a huge military-industrial-media complex, it shouldn’t be surprising
that whether in the prelude to the Gulf War of 1991 or the Iraq invasion of
2003, the U.S.’s biggest media institutions did little to illuminate how Washington and business interests had combined to strengthen and arm Saddam
Hussein during many of his worst crimes? In corporate medialand, history could
be supremely relevant when it focused on Hussein’s torture and genocide, but
the historic assistance he got from the U.S. government and American firms
was apt to be off the subject and beside the point.54
Administration officials and retired military officers made up 76 percent of
total sources used in U.S. media during the coverage leading up to the war in
Iraq, according to FAIR.55 This close relationship between the media and official power has an empowering effect on the military-industrial-media complex, and squelches critical views of U.S. policy. Chris Hedges notes that the
media were willing participants in the war effort: “The notion that the press
was used in the war is incorrect. The press wanted to be used. It saw itself as
part of the war effort. Such docility on the part of the press made it easier to
do what governments do in wartime, indeed what governments do much of
the time, and that is lie.”56
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Media ownership often exercises control over the form and content of media broadcasts from its subsidiaries. When ABC’s “Nightline” showed pictures of the 721 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq, the Sinclair Broadcast Group,
which owns ABC affiliates, refused to air the program, saying that showing
the pictures amounted to a statement against the war. The Walt Disney company blocked its Miramax division from distributing Michael Moore’s film
“Fahrenheit 9/11,” which criticized the Bush Administration and the war in
Iraq. According to Moore’s agent, Disney’s chief executive, Michael Eisner,
was worried that a film so critical of the Bush administration would endanger the tax breaks Disney receives for its theme parks from the Florida state
government, headed by the President’s brother Governor Jeb Bush. Disney
denies the charges, stating that it simply had no interest in being part of a
highly partisan political battle.57
Norman Solomon decries how the media have let military, corporate, and
political officials define acceptable coverage: “countless journalists—whether
they’re flag-wavers at Fox News or liberal sophisticates at NPR News—keep letting authorities define the bounds of appropriate empathy and moral concern.”
He continues, “I know of very few mainstream American journalists who have
pointed out that President Bush has the blood of many Iraqi children on his
hands after launching an aggressive war in violation of the U.N. Charter and
the Nuremberg principles established more than half a century ago.”58
In at least one instance, the U.S. government has offered advice on how
major newspapers and television networks should cover important, sensitive
material. In the aftermath of 9/11, then-national security adviser Condoleeza
Rice offered network executives from several prominent news networks, including CNN and Fox News, guiding advice concerning coverage of bin
Laden’s and Al’Qaeda’s taped statements. Rice urged that segments of the
tapes shown be shortened to avoid giving bin Laden or Al’Qaeda a platform
to air their views or pass along coded messages. The networks complied, raising concern from media watch groups. FAIR observed that government “advice” could have a chilling effect on any coverage of bin Laden: “it is inappropriate for the government to dictate to journalists how to report the news.
In the context of recent heavy-handedness on the part of the administration
(including White House spokesman Ari Fleischer’s ominous remark that
Americans ‘need to watch what they say’), Rice’s request suggests that the
White House is actually asking for something other than simple journalistic
judgement.” In contrast, other media executives were unconcerned: Rupert
Murdoch said that Fox News would “do whatever is our patriotic duty,” and
Walter Isaacson of CNN said that “after hearing Dr. Rice, we’re not going to
step on the land mines she was talking about.”59
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Media ownership structures are often intertwined with corporate and foreign policy power. Members of a media company’s board of directors often sit
on other corporate boards. Douglas McCorkindale, CEO of the Gannett
News Company, which has publishing interests with USA Today and various
television and internet outlets, also serves on the board of Lockheed-Martin,
a company that produces missiles. Other board members have ties to political power: Viet Dinh, a Georgetown Law professor who sits on News Corp’s
board, is a former Assistant Attorney General and foreign policy adviser for
President Bush. William Kennard, board member at the New York Times, is a
former FCC Chairman and sits on the board of the Carlyle Group, a military
defense contractor. Time-Warner board member Carla Hills is a trustee at the
Center for Strategic and International Studies and Vice-Chair at the Council on Foreign Relations, both establishment think tanks. Hills also sits on
the board of the oil company Chevron. These are only a few examples of ties
between owners of the mainstream media and military, corporations, and
government.60
Large media corporations have benefitted from the deregulation advocated by bodies like the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). With
few limits on how many media outlets a corporation can own, media corporations and government have entered into a mutually beneficial relationship.
Large media companies whose outlets already rely heavily on government
press releases and information from government or military sources are rewarded with the ability to buy more and more outlets. In turn, the government benefits from the reduced diversity of opinion and from ownership of
virtually all major media outlets by companies that stick to the official script.
Since 1983, the number of companies who own a large segment of the mainstream media has been strikingly reduced from fifty to five.61
Who are these powerful owners of multiple media venues? Journalist
Robert Parry notes that “News organizations are hierarchical institutions often run by strong-willed men who insist that their editorial vision be dominant within their news companies.” While some concessions, says Parry, are
made to principles of objectivity and fairness, media owners have historically
“enforced their political views and other preferences by installing senior editors whose careers depend on delivering a news product that fits with the
owner’s prejudices.”62 Rupert Murdoch, chief executive of News Corporation,
the world’s largest global media empire, exemplifies this; publishing more than
175 titles, he dominates the newspaper markets in Britain, Australia, and
New Zealand. He also has substantial television holdings, including Fox
News, but it is through his newspapers that Murdoch is known for promoting
his own particular perspective. Murdoch is not reticent about publicly airing
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his views, whether in interviews or through the media he owns. Speaking of
Murdoch’s “unerring ability to choose editors that think just like him,” The
Guardian’s Roy Greenslade asks, “How else can we explain the extraordinary
unity of thought in his newspaper empire about the need to make war on Iraq?
After an exhaustive survey of News Corp’s highest-selling and most influential papers across the world, Greenslade observes that “it is clear that all are
singing from the same hymn sheet. . . . Their master’s voice has never been
questioned.”63
Murdoch has been criticized on a number of fronts. Many of the concerns
arise from the sheer size of his media ownership in particular markets. Business Week states
His satellites deliver TV programs in five continents, all but dominating
Britain, Italy, and wide swaths of Asia and the Middle East. He publishes 175
newspapers, including the New York Post and The Times of London. In the U.S.,
he owns the Twentieth Century Fox Studio, Fox Network, and 35 TV stations
that reach more than 40 percent of the country. . . . His cable channels include
fast-growing Fox News, and 19 regional sports channels. In all, as many as one
in five American homes at any given time will be tuned in to a show News
Corp. either produced or delivered.64
Murdoch claims to avoid partisan politics, but according to The New Yorker,
that hasn’t stopped him from using his media outlets to advance his own political and business interests. His support for Bush and the war on terror has
been unwavering, sometimes at the expense of accuracy. For example, according to the Sydney Morning Herald, Murdoch’s The Daily Telegraph reported
that British troops in Iraq had uncovered a site containing the remains of
hundreds of Saddam’s “torture victims.”65 It was later reported on CNN and
in the New York Times that the site actually housed the remains of Iraqi and
Iranian soldiers killed in the Iraq-Iran war. The Sydney Morning Herald noted
that Murdoch’s “vast newspaper empire has waged a relentless pro-war propaganda war before and since the war began without even the pretense, in many
cases, that even the facade of journalism—a genuine attempt to get the facts
in the time available and to present what is known at the time of going to
press, appropriately attributed—is being preserved. It just so happens that
Murdoch wants U.S. government approval to take over DirecTV and further
extend his grip on pay TV.”66 In exchange for his support, the government
consented to Murdoch extending his media acquisition still further.
One of the most obvious outlets of Murdoch’s brand of propaganda is
Fox News. Its extent is made obvious by the resignation of producer Serene
Sabbagh, who decided to leave because of Fox News’ “bias and racism” in
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covering the Israeli invasion of Lebanon. She describes watching “the raw
images of children being pulled out of the rubble,” then switching to Fox
News to “hear some of their anchors claiming that these little kids that
were killed, these innocent victims that were killed, were human shields
used by Hezbollah. And one of the anchors went as far as saying they were
planted there by Hezbollah to win support in this war. And it was unbelievable. For me, that was the breaking point.”67
David Brock, of Media Matters for America, disputes Fox News’s claim
that it is “fair and balanced” in its coverage. Brock illustrates his claim by
citing Media Matters’ many studies, demonstrating Fox News’ consistent
pro-conservative bias. Conservative commentators far outnumber liberal
ones, and pro-Republican sentiment is often injected into coverage of “hard
news” rather than being confined to editorials. Coverage of events is micromanaged at Fox, as memos from Senior Vice President John Moody to employees makes clear; Moody said that Bush’s “political courage and tactical
cunning” are worth “noting in our reporting through the day,” and urged reporters covering on the 9/11 Commission findings not to “turn this into Watergate.”68
Because of his media empire’s extensive reach, Murdoch’s use of his outlets to pursue his own agenda and interests is significant. As his media conglomerate continues to grow, the range and diversity of voices in media will
shrink. As the Fox News memo scandal suggests, Murdoch outlets are strictly
content-controlled; this is not lost on politicians who know that positive
coverage in News Corp. outlets will help their public image. Murdoch is,
therefore, a figure of enormous influence and power.
If objective journalism has suffered from too much individual control, it
has also suffered from economic pressures. The decline of newspapers, the
rise of infotainment, and media owners’ insistence on delivering high returns
to shareholders have diminished resources and led to a bottom-line fixation
inconducive to aggressive reporting. The meteoric success of right-wing media outlets like Fox News and controversial commentators like Limbaugh
and Coulter has not encouraged media owners to pursue critical journalism.69
Advertisers
In Manufacturing Consent, Chomsky and Herman observe that the media
face pressures to show a series of programs that will encourage “audience
flow,” keeping an audience watching from program to program so as to sustain advertising revenues. In general, advertisers want “to avoid programs
with serious complexities and disturbing controversies that interfere with the
‘buying mood.’”70 Since media owners want to keep operations highly prof-
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itable and since advertisers are the main source of revenue, it is essential not
to alienate the corporations that spend millions on commercials. In its 2003
“Fear & Favor” report, media watchdog FAIR examines the the pressures exerted by advertisers on programming; FAIR’s Janine Jackson told the American Free Press that 60 percent of the journalists it surveyed said advertisers
“try to change stories.”71
Advertisers are extremely influential; the media’s primary goal is not to attract and keep viewers but, through their viewers, to attract and keep advertisers. Advertisers pay well for access to an audience. During the lead-up to
the U.S. invasion of Iraq, broadcasters, publishers, and advertising executives
were concerned revenue would drop as companies pulled ads from wartime
news broadcasts, worried that they would appear in an “unfavorable editorial
environment,” the content of serious war coverage clashing with ads for cars,
cell phones, and property insurance. Advertisers behaved similarly immediately after 9/11, pulling ads from news networks, newspapers, and radio
broadcasts. For broadcasters and publishers interested in covering critical aspects of the war as well as maintaining ad revenue, the advertising pullout
presented a challenge. If advertisers do not want ads to appear amid war coverage, news outlets might avoid airing controversial stories or editorials. Public reaction to advertising during wartime is also an issue, according to ad executive Ben Weiner, who observed that “Nobody wants to be the advertiser
who gets beaten up for being remotely unpatriotic.”72 It is not hard to imagine, then, that advertisers might lean more towards news outlets that appear
less critical of the war effort, or air less controversial editorial content, in order to disassociate their products from unpatriotic views. Such worries are
not unwarranted: Deborah Johns and Michelle Souza of California Marine
Moms & Military Families called for the boycott of a Sacramento radio station after it replaced a conservative talk show host with a liberal host who
opposed the war in Iraq. The boycott includes any businesses that advertise
during the liberal host’s program.73
Not all advertisers can purchase time in the media, however, even when
they have the money. Because of the overall lack of diversity of opinion in
mainstream media, many non-profit or non-governmental organizations raise
funds to buy advertising time to get their message out. While advertising is the
life-blood of the media, in some instances corporate ownership is selective
about the messages it broadcasts. MTV, CNN and other networks refused to air
anti-war ads produced by organizations like Not in Our Name and Win Without War, citing “company policy;” these networks do, however, air recruiting
ads from the armed forces.74 “It is irresponsible for news organizations not to
accept ads that are controversial on serious issues, assuming they are not scur-
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rilous or in bad taste,” says Alex Jones of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the
Press, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard. “In the world we live in, with the
kind of media concentration we have, the only way that unpopular beliefs can
be aired sometimes is if the monopoly vehicle agrees to accept an ad.”75
Media Sources
When a newspaper is taken over by a large monopoly, the new owners regularly start by firing 30 percent of the staff, raising the number of stories expected by the remaining writers from 40 to 80 a month, and adding new responsibilities.76 Overburdened reporters lack the time to thoroughly
fact-check material or seek out alternative viewpoints. Thus, the information
obtained from “official” or “reliable”sources can often be accepted without
question as truth. According to FAIR, the trend within mainstream media is
to lend more space, prominence, and credence to official sources, usually current or former government representatives or spokespersons, both civilian
and military.77 Selectivity of sources leads to significant imbalances in representation: in media coverage of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Steve Rendall and
Tara Broughel note that 64 percent of news sources were pro-war, as were 71
percent of the guest commentators. Anti-war voices made up only 10 percent
of all media sources, suggesting that viewers were more than six times as
likely to see a pro-war as an anti-war source. Looking only at guest commentators, the ratio increases to 25 to 1. Of quoted officials, military voices outnumbered civilian sources by a two-to-one margin, providing 68 percent of
U.S. official sources and nearly half (47 percent) of total sources.78 Media
scholar Robert McChesney observes that news agencies tend to regard “anything done by official sources, e.g. government officials and prominent public figures, as the basis for legitimate news. This gave those in political office
(and, to a lesser extent, business) considerable power to set the news agenda
by what they spoke about and what they kept quiet about.”79 It is not the prowar nature of the sources that is dangerous, but the lack of balance in sources;
FAIR observes that exaggeration occurs regardless of the political viewpoint
and on both ends of the political spectrum.80
This imbalance is reflected in the fact that right-wing think tanks are cited
in the media three times as often as center or left policy organizations.81 By
dominating public policy debates through aggressive strategies to influence the
way media covers political and economic issues, argues Trudy Lieberman, they
are essentially shaping the public’s thinking.82 Sound bites and citing of “reputable sources,” named or unnamed, give credibility and authority to what is
presented. Dependence on official sources from government or business, explains Chomsky and Herman, tends to make high-profile people automatically
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viewed as reputable and therefore exempted from real questioning. In contrast,
when a foreign government makes similar statements, it is easier to recognize
propaganda or to look for other sources to provide verification.83
Many forms of bias can be detected in media coverage: a 2001 FAIR study
of the newscasts of the three major television networks found that 92 percent
of all U.S. sources interviewed were white, 85 percent were male and, where
party affiliation was identifiable, 75 percent were Republican.84 More than
one in four interviewees were politicians, while only three percent represented non-governmental advocacy groups. While this study focuses only on
major networks, it does demonstrate heavy reliance on political sources in
important mainstream outlets. FAIR also reports in a year-long study of
CNN’s Reliable Sources program that not only was the range of sources narrow but a bias was detected which “strongly favored mainstream media insiders and right-leaning pundits. In addition, female critics were significantly
under-represented, ethnic minority voices were almost non-existent and progressive voices were far outnumbered by their conservative counterparts.”85
Over-reliance on official sources allowed less space for independent or
critical voices. Not only were anti-war representatives rarely seen, but not a
single program in the entire study featured an in-depth, sit-down interview
with a person who was against the war; instead, anti-war voices were relegated to one-sentence sound bites, often by demonstrators or “unofficial”
people on the street. In a study during a two-week period prior to the Iraq
war, NBC, CBS, ABC and PBS recorded 393 interviews on the conflict, of
which only three reported the anti-war movement. This “does not represent
mainstream opinion in the US,”Amy Goodman told the audience at a 2006
al-Jazeera sponsored media conference in Qatar.86
Mainstream news media are also affected by the influential public relations industry which, through VNRs, paid experts, engineered citizens’
groups, press releases and canned news events, shapes the news to suit the interests of its clients. Alex Carey, pioneering scholar of PR, observed that the
role of PR is to so muddle the public sphere as to “take the risk out of democracy” for the wealthy and corporations. PR is welcomed by media owners, as it effectively subsidizes programs by providing content at no cost. Surveys show that PR accounts for anywhere from 40 percent to an astonishing
70 percent of what is broadcast as news.87
Flak
Another influence on media, working through both external and internal
mechanisms, is flak, or organized campaigns aimed at influencing media content through letters, phone calls, petitions, lawsuits and legislation. Flak can
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come from a number of sources, civic, corporate, or religious; whatever the
source, it tends to have a conservatizing effect, as programmers internally
shape future broadcast to avoid it. Chomsky and Herman point out how various right-wing media watch groups and think tanks were set up in the 1980s
to heavily criticize anything in the media that appeared to have a liberal or
left wing bias or be overtly anti-business. Combined with increasing monopoly ownership, this had a profound impact. Ben Bagdikian notes that “Corporations have multimillion-dollar budgets to dissect and attack news reports
they dislike. But with each passing year they have yet another power: They
are not only hostile to independent journalists. They are their employers.88
One example of this hostile climate can be detected in MSNBC’s cancellation of the Phil Donahue Show in March 2003 amidst rumors that Donahue’s show was viewed as too liberal by some at the network The cancellation was accompanied by the decision to add conservatives Dick Armey, Joe
Scarborough, and Michael Savage to the network’s contributors and hosts.
Media analyst Rick Ellis proposes that Donahue’s show was cancelled precisely because the network wanted to avoid flak from viewers; it commissioned a study that claimed Donahue presented a “difficult public face for
NBC in a time of war” and expressed concern that the show might become
“a home for the liberal antiwar agenda at the same time that our competitors
are waving the flag at every opportunity.”89
After an experiment with a balanced assortment of guests and a more
moderate approach did not result in high ratings, the network allowed Donahue to steer the show in his own direction. Although this resulted in
healthy ratings, the network nevertheless canceled the program. Donahue
maintains his show was cancelled not because of ratings, but because
MSNBC was wary of presenting a strong antiwar voice in a milieu where doing so could be publically construed as unpatriotic: “Well, we were the only
antiwar voice that had a show, and that, I think, made them very nervous. I
mean, from the top down, they were just terrified.”90
Self-Censorship
The mainstream media is now admitting the extent to which they failed
in their coverage of the war on terror. As early as 2002, veteran broadcaster
Dan Rather told BBC Television that fear of being labeled unpatriotic had
caused American journalists to engage in “a form of self-censorship.”91 By
2005, the harsh realities of the war with its loss of lives and astronomical expense had begun to quell the fevered emotions roused by 9/11. Mainstream
media began to pick up rumblings of discontent among increasing segments
of the American public and alternative media.
Media March to War 177
Yet self-censorship continues, according to a survey of nearly 300 journalists and news executives by the Pew Research Center and the Columbia Journalism Review. About one-quarter of local and national journalists acknowledge purposely avoiding newsworthy stories, while nearly as many say they
have softened the tone of stories to benefit the interests of their news organizations.92 Viewers have begun to recognize the effects of these pressures; in
2005 a McCormick Tribune Foundation/Gallup Poll found more than half of
Americans did not believe they received enough information to make informed decisions about the war on Iraq. A majority of Americans, the poll
notes, give low ratings to both government and the media for news for coverage of reasons for going to war, with 68 percent and 61 percent of Americans respectively giving “only fair” or “poor” ratings.”93
A polarization of viewpoints limits the presentation of information;
within a narrowly defined range of discussion, the coverage of the war on terror was detailed but far from impartial. There is a widespread expectation
that news media will be free of bias or distortion but today’s media are predominantly corporate-owned, their controls in the hands of a powerful few.
Concentration of ownership and a corporate mentality combine to create an
atmosphere in which external flak and internal pressures have pushed news
coverage firmly, although perhaps not irrevocably, to the right.
Ideology
The movement of media to the right is sometimes deliberate, as when it responds to advertisers, and sometimes unintentional and unconscious, through
subtle media frames and filters. Herman and Chomsky note that these filters
occur so naturally that media news people, often operating with complete integrity and goodwill, are able to convince themselves that they choose and interpret the news objectively and on the basis of professional values. Internal
censorship may arise inadvertently in response to public anger; John
MacArthur, publisher of Harper’s Magazine, notes that there used to be a public awareness that honest investigative journalism was innately valuable and
that “the patriotic thing to do is to tell the American people the truth.” Now
however, says MacArthur, this impartiality has been re-cast as lack of patriotism; there is “tremendous hostility to the free press in this country.”94 Even
more powerful than this external hostility, maintain Herman and Chomsky,
are the internal and structural workings by which media manufactures consent,
constraints which are “so powerful, and are built into the system in such a fundamental way, that alternative bases of news choices are hardly imaginable.”95
Media ethicists have recognized that mainstream media were swept up in
a patriotic fervor that impaired its sense of professionalism. In the United
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States in particular, journalists and anchors confused support for their country with allegiance to the actions of their leaders. News networks tried to
outdo each other in demonstrating loyalty. To be openly critical was dangerous: charges of being unpatriotic, even traitorous, were leveled against those
questioning the actions of President Bush and his Cabinet. In a time when
the government was over-riding the Constitution and expanding its powers
in the name of national security, these were dangerous allegations. In this climate journalists, especially news anchors who became “icons of sentimental
patriotism, resisted this role at their peril.”96 When PBS anchors on The
NewsHour with Jim Lehrer refused to wear American flag pins on-air, stating
that they believed it was important to maintain a distance from the government on which they reported, viewers denounced them as unpatriotic.97 In
contrast, Dan Rather said on David Letterman’s show on September 17,
2001, “George Bush is the president, he makes the decisions, and, you know,
as just one American, he wants me to line up, just tell me where.” On the
same show, a few weeks later, ABC’s Cokie Roberts stated, “Look, I am, I will
just confess to you, a total sucker for the guys who stand up with all the ribbons on and stuff and they say it’s true and I’m ready to believe it.”98
In the aftermath of 9/11, the media failed to ask the necessary hard questions, engaging instead in a competition to outdo each other in showing the
flag, or the flag pin. “That’s not what journalists should be doing,” says Amy
Goodman, “we should be independent,” not just “the megaphone for officialdom.”99 Robert Jensen of the University of Texas School of Journalism
raises further concerns about the relationship between patriotism and journalism. He argues that an ideology rooted in patriotism prevents many
American journalists from clearly seeing their government’s war agenda; it is
precisely in times of war, he states, “when a democracy most desperately
needs a critical, independent journalism working outside the ideological constraints of the culture,” that commercial mainstream news media is most
likely to “fail profoundly.”100
The Fox network’s success is one mark of this failure. Its formula of opinionated, conservative, patriotic news journalism has made it America’s most
watched cable news station. Other networks have followed suit, implementing programming changes that echo Fox-style news broadcasts, a pattern
some call “the Fox Effect.” Many networks, wary of critics who argued that
journalistic traditions of objectivity and balance were simply masks for a liberal bias, adjusted the tone and content of their broadcasts to replicate those
of Fox News. MSNBC, for example, added American flag graphics, a portrait
of President Bush on the main set, and a studio wall devoted to “America’s
Bravest,” the men and women serving in Iraq.101 This, with MSNBC’s can-
Media March to War 179
cellation of Donahue’s program and its addition of conservative commentators, demonstrates the extent of the Fox Effect on other broadcasters. PBS
also made changes to combat what is seen by some as an “anti-Bush” or “liberal” bias. In 2005, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting hired a White
House staffer to add conservative voices to PBS in order to restore “objectivity and balance,” despite survey results that suggested the public viewed
PBS as objective and trustworthy.102 MSNBC president Erik Sorenson justified such changes, saying “After Sept. 11 the country wants more optimism
and benefit of the doubt. It’s about being positive as opposed to being negative.”103 However, Andrew Heyward, president of CBS News, expressed caution over loss of objectivity in reporting: “There is a long-standing tradition
in the mainstream press of middle-of-the-road journalism that is objective
and fair. I would hate to see that fall victim to a panic about the Fox effect.”104
Critical Journalism
By its nature, investigative journalism usually involves writing against the
grain and confronting prevailing political orthodoxies. It lifts rocks, peers behind facades, refuses to accept official versions at face value, and is skeptical
of vested interests. Inevitably, investigative reporters are treated with suspicion, sometimes hostility, by the subjects of their investigations. Despite this,
there are journalists today who determinedly pursue stories and overcome obstacles placed in their way. Many are uncovering stories that profoundly affect our world. During the lead-up to the Iraq war and throughout the occupation, mainstream U.S. media failed to question the Bush administration’s
claims about its justifications for invasion and the conduct of the occupation.
A few journalists, however, questioned the government line, uncovered important stories, and reported alternative narratives not shaped by government spin. Most of these operate outside the mainstream, as independent,
web, or foreign-based; only a select few appear in major newspapers, journals,
or on major television networks. One such news outlet was the Knight Ridder group (now The McClatchy Company), whose journalists and editors did
not take government claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction (WMD) as
absolute truth. At a time when mainstream papers faithfully repeated Bush
administration claims about Saddam’s nuclear ambitions and the danger
posed by Iraq, Knight Ridder asked questions seldom raised elsewhere. After
no stockpiles of WMD were found in Iraq after a year of occupation, other
media outlets grew increasingly skeptical of the official story. The critical difference between the reporting done by Knight Ridder and the reporting done
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by other newspapers, according to Knight Ridder Washington reporter Warren Strobel, was in their selection of sources: “I’m not saying we didn’t have
any top-level sources, but we also made a conscious effort to talk to people
more in the bowels of government who have a less political approach to
things.”105
Knight Ridder journalists faced intimidation from the Bush administration: the agency received angry phone calls from government officials, and
the White House attempted to keep its journalists from attending press briefings. In an environment when critical coverage could be construed as unpatriotic, Knight Ridder stood out as a challenging voice. Its journalists were
the first to entertain the idea that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence to justify its designs to overthrow Saddam. Three years later, The
London Times covered the allegations when the Downing Street Memos were
made public, but the damning content of the memos came as no surprise to
the journalists at Knight Ridder.106
Another rare voice of dissent within an otherwise complacent mainstream
media comes from Seymour Hersh. Since uncovering the massacre at My Lai
and its cover-up, Hersh has been one of investigative journalism’s key figures.
He has been consistently critical of the Bush administration’s War on Terror;
in the spring of 2006, he published a story detailing the administration’s
plans to topple the Iranian government, which included the option of using
nuclear weapons. His journalistic record, position within the mainstream,
and trustworthy reputation ensured that instead of being dismissed (as it was
by the Bush administration), Hersh’s piece became front page news around
the world.107 Hersh was the first American reporter to state that WMD
would not be found in Iraq, and was central in uncovering the Abu Ghraib
torture scandal and revealing the secret CIA “black sites” that housed abductees suspected of having links to terrorism.108 Hersh has also weathered
intimidation: he was been accused of sympathizing with the enemy and inflaming anti-American sentiment around the world with his stories documenting atrocities at My Lai and Abu Ghraib. These accusations have not
stopped him from publishing stories that paint a sobering picture of the occupation of Iraq.
London-based journalist and documentary film-maker John Pilger has also
been a consistent critic of both the war on terror and the mainstream media’s
acquiescence. Pilger has been vocal in illuminating and clarifying the extent
and nature of the Iraqi resistance. He insists that if the public wants news free
of obfuscation and misdirection, it needs to consider the contributions of citizen journalism: bloggers and internet sites, for example, were instrumental
in exposing U.S. use of the chemical agents white phosphorus and napalm
Media March to War 181
during the siege of Fallujah, something embedded journalists did not report.
Pilger attributes this journalistic blind spot to mainstream journalists’ lack of
interviews with locals, victims of U.S. atrocities, or other, unembedded journalists. When citizen journalists forced the U.S. to admit its use of chemical
agents, the mainstream media invariably cast the incident as a PR crisis, ignoring the larger point of the suffering experienced by the victims of chemical weapons. Pilger points to freelance journalists Jo Wilding and Dahr Jamail as examples of journalists who cover the human cost of such military
operations by offering eyewitness reports and interviews with doctors, local
officials, and families. Amy Goodman emphasizes the important political implications of this kind of journalism when she states, “If people in the U.S.
had a true picture of war—dead babies, women with their legs blown off,
dead and dying soldiers—they would say ‘no’.”109 Pilger also lists important
websites that are devoted to this kind of coverage, including zmag.org,
truthout.com, informationclearinghouse.info, and counterpunch.org.110
Robert Fisk of the Independent is another prominent journalist who has
worked outside the mainstream and offers a critical perspective of U.S. military involvement in the Middle East. Fisk has been a vocal critic of what he
terms “hotel journalism,” Western journalism that, because of Iraq’s dangers,
relies on Iraqi stringers and secondhand information for important news stories. Fisk views embedded journalism as detrimental to good journalism; he
notes that “rarely, if ever, has a war been covered by reporters in so distant
and restricted a way.”111 Fisk describes New York Times correspondents living
in Baghdad behind massive stockades and protected by security guards. NBC
reporters stay in a hotel with iron grills on their doors, forbidden by security
advisers to go to the hotel pool or restaurant, “let alone the rest of Baghdad,”
for fear of attack. Many Western journalists simply do not leave their rooms
while in Baghdad, a situation, says one long-time American correspondent,
that the military couldn’t be happier with, since “They know that if they
bomb a house of innocent people, they can claim it was a ‘terrorist’ base and
get away with it. They don’t want us roaming around Iraq and so the ‘terrorist’ threat is great news for them. They can claim they’ve shot 600 or 1,000
insurgents and we have no way of checking because we can’t go to the cemetery or visit the hospitals because we don’t want to get kidnapped and have
our throats cut.”112
Amy Goodman has been a consistent supporter of independent media and
a critic of the war on terror. She has critically addressed the administration’s
claims used to justify war with Iraq, the marginalizing of progressive voices in
the mainstream media, and the program of “embedded” journalists.113 She argues that “the Bush Administration not finding weapons of mass destruction
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laid bare more than the Bush Administration. It laid bare media that act as
a conveyer belt for the lies of the Administration. You know governments are
going to lie, but not the media. So I think people started to seek out other
forms of information.”114 Another critical voice can be found in Washington
Post correspondent Ellen Knickmeyer, who exposed the massacre in Haditha.
Her coverage demonstrates what John Pilger advocates: a humanizing concern for the people of Iraq, conveyed through the use of interviews with local officials, doctors, coroners, and families of victims. Knickmeyer also documents statements from human rights organizations like Human Rights
Watch.115 Another key figure, author and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist
Dana Priest, has been prominent in the uncovering of so-called CIA “black
sites.” In the Washington Post, Priest has dedicated column space to the questions of morality and legality surrounding the use of secret prisons by the
CIA to hold and interrogate terror suspects.116
With today’s technology, citizens have greater access to a variety of news,
analysis and commentary than ever before. The internet enables people to
post their own stories and opinions online; its ability to allow wide dissemination of viewpoints and information is revolutionary in the same way that
the invention of the printing press spread revolutionary social, political and
scientific change across fifteenth-century Europe. The reach of the internet
and the growth of news-related websites give people the means to gather and
share perspectives online. With the rise of blogging, citizen journalism is on
the increase. As a result, the number of alternative news and opinion sources
have multiplied in the past decade, appealing to a younger demographic, who
have grown up with all the internet offerings of communication, recreation,
and entertainment, and who do not look automatically to television or print
media for information. In an interview on PBS’s Media War, Jeff Fager, executive producer of 60 Minutes, discussed the CBS partnership with Yahoo!
News. “We haven’t seen the model for how broadcast journalism is going to
end up on the Internet,” he says. “But it has to go there. I mean, you don’t
see anybody between 20 and 30 getting their news from the evening news;
you see them getting it online.”117
Falling newspaper circulation figures and declining audience shares of
mainstream radio and television all suggest the extent of contemporary media upheaval. Markos Moulitsas, author the blog Daily Kos, which reportedly
receives 3 to 5 million visitors per week, explains that “People want to be
part of the media: they don’t want to sit there and listen anymore. They’re
too educated. They’re taught to be go-getters and not to sit back and be passive consumers. And the traditional media is still predicated on the passive
consumer model—you sit there and watch.”118 Being “part of the media”
Media March to War 183
rather than subject to it lies in finding supplements and alternatives: Faisal
al-Kasim, host of the al-Jazeera program The Opposite Direction, observed that
“as a result of the perceived failure of western media to reflect the full picture, more people were turning to Arabic media.”119 Not only Arabs living
abroad but increasing numbers of westerners turn to English-language Arab
media to get a perspective unrepresented in the one-sided coverage of the
West. Faisal did not claim there was no bias in the Arabic media but at least,
he said, it offers an alternative voice and therefore allows the audience to
make its own decision as to where the truth lies.
An interplay of overlapping, contiguous, and oppositional perspectives
from a range of sources and contexts might represent our best hope of detecting a greater truth. But if traditional investigative journalism has been
hampered by its assigned wartime role as stenographer to power, if media monopolies have ensured that limited interests will dominate, and if media is
both unconsciously shaped by its frames and consciously shaping in its
metaphors, how is this to happen? The consequences of not extricating ourselves from this dilemma, as suggested by the rise of both domestic and international backlash, are increasingly critical.
Notes
1. Philippa Strum. “The Journalist as Historian: Anthony Lewis, Civil Liberties, and
the Supreme Court.” Journal of Supreme Court History. Volume 29, Issue 2, July 2004:
191–206.
2. Norman Fairclough. Language and Power. London: Longman, 1989: 54.
3. bell hooks. [videorecording] bell hooks: Cultural Criticism and Transformation.
Media Education Foundation, 1997.
4. Greg Philo. “Television News and Audience Understanding of War, Conflict
and Disaster.” In Journalism Studies, 3(2), May 2002: 173–86.
5. Ruth Wodak. “Discourse and Racism” in Deborah Schiffrin, Deborah Tannen
and Heidi Hamilton (eds). The Handbook of Discourse Analysis. London: Blackwell,
2001: 372.
6. Program on International Policy Attitudes (PIPA). “Study Finds Direct Link Between Misinformation and Public Misconception.” October 2, 2003. See www.truthout
.org/docs _03/100403F.shtml (July 11, 2007).
7. PIPA. “Study Finds Direct Link Between Misinformation and Public Misconception.”
8. spin. “Bookseller of Baghdad.”Gbytes of Gbytes. April 6, 2007. See gbytes.gsood
.com/catagory/middle-east>. (July 11, 2007).
9. Howard Zinn. “Lessons of Iraq War start with U.S. history.” The Progressive Media
Project. March 8, 2006. See www.progressive.org/media_mpzinn030806 (July 11, 2007).
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10. Michael Parenti. “Monopoly Media Manipulation.” Michael Parenti.org. May
2001. See www.michaelparenti.org/MonopolyMedia.html (July 10, 2007).
11. Michael Parenti. “Monopoly Media Manipulation.”
12. Michael Parenti. “Monopoly Media Manipulation.”
13. Michael Parenti. “Monopoly Media Manipulation.”
14. Karim. H. Karim. Islamic Peril: Media and Global Violence. Montreal: Black Rose
Books, 2003.
15. Noam Chomsky. “Interviews.” Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the
Media. [Videorecording]. Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick. Necessary Illusions.1992.
16. Gary Kamiya. “Iraq: Why the Media Failed.” Salon. April 10, 2007. See www
.salon.com/opinion/Kamiya/2007/04/10/media_failure (July 11, 2007).
17. David Edwards. “The Media Is Tough on Terrorism but Not Tough on the
Causes of Terrorism.” Media Lens. September 2001. See www.medialens.org/articles
/the_articles/articles _2001/de_tough_on_terrorism.html (July 11, 2007).
18. David Edwards. “The Media Is Tough on Terrorism.”
19. David Edwards. “The Media Is Tough on Terrorism.”
20. Kenneth Payne. “The Media as an Instrument of War.” Parameters. Spring
2005.
21. Kenneth Payne. “The Media as an Instrument of War.”
22. Cited in AlertNet. “Media Ignore Iraq’s Humanitarian Issues.” November 13,
2006. See www.globalpolicy.org/security/issues/iraq/media/2006/1113ignores.htm
(July 17, 2007).
23. Julia Day. “US Media at ‘all-time low.’” The Guardian. February 2, 2006.
24. Les Roberts, Riyadh Lafta, Richard Garfield, Jamal Khudhairi, and Gilbert
Burnham. “Mortality before and after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: cluster sample survey.” Lancet. October 29, 2004.
25. Judith Coburn. “Unnamed and Unnoticed: Iraqi Casualties.” TomDispatch.
July 18, 2005. See www.tomdispatch.com/index.mhtml?pid=6963 (July 15, 2007).
26. William Blum. “Civilian Casualties: Theirs and Ours.” Counter Punch. December 17, 2001. See www.counterpunch.org/blumcasualties.html (July 15, 2007).
27. Robert Parry. “So Bush did steal the White House.” Asheville Global Report. No.
150, Nov. 29–Dec. 5, 2001. See www.agrnews.org/issues/150/commentary.html (July
17, 2007).
28. Dave Markland. “Media blind to Afghan civilian deaths.” Seven Oaks Magazine.
December 29, 2006. See www.sevenoaksmag.com/features/civiliancasualties.html
(July 15, 2007).
29. Editor and Publisher Staff. “Public Faults Media on Military Issues, Poll
Finds.” Editor & Publisher. August 8, 2005. See www.mediatank.org/resources/articles
/2005/08/08/publicfaultsmedia.html (July 15, 2007).
30. Haider Rizvi. “Frustration Marks Another War Anniversary.” Global Policy.
March 19, 2007. See www.globalpolicy.org/ngos/role/iraq.htm (July 15. 2007).
31. BBC. “Millions join anti-war protests worldwide.” BBC News Online, February 17, 2003.
Media March to War 185
32. Virginia Grantier. “Journalist Laments State of War Coverage.” Bismarck Tribune (North Dakota). October 10, 2004.
33. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent: the Political
Economy of the Mass Media. New York: Pantheon, 1988.
34. Tami Silico interview with Joan Pliego. “The Reality had to get out.” Real
Change News.October 28, 2004. See www.realchangenews.org/2004/2004_10_28
/issue/current/coverstory.html (July 12, 2007).
35. Adam Taylor. “UD Professor Sue over DAFB photos.” The News Journal. October 5, 2004. See www.delawareonline.com/newsjournal/local/2005/04/28pentagon
release.html (June 1, 2007).
36. Doug Struck. “In Canada, An Uproar Over Army Casualties.” Washington Post
Foreign Service. April 26, 2006.
37. Military Families Speak Out. “The Flag-Draped Coffins.” March 14th, 2004.
See www.mfso.org/article.php?id=316 (July 15, 2007).
38. Aly Colon. “Embed Journalists Everywhere.” Poynter.org. March 17, 2003. See
www.poynter.org/column.asp?id=58&aid=25265 (July 15, 2007).
39. Henry Michaels. “Pentagon, media agree on Iraq war censorship.” World Socialist Web Site. March 5, 2003. See www.wsws.org/articles/2003/mar2003/med-m05
.shtml (July 15, 2007).
40. Terence Smith. “Battlefield Bylines.” PBS NewsHour Online. February 18, 2003.
See www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/military/jan-june03/bylinesb_2-18.html (July 15, 2007).
41. Inquisitor U.S. editor. “Controlling the News with Embedded Journalists.” Inquisitor. April 27, 2003. See www.inquisitoronline.com/news/0304embedded.html
(July 15, 2007).
42. Sourcewatch. “Embedded.” Sourcewatch. March 31, 2005. See www.source
watch.org/index.php?title=Embedded (July 15, 2007).
43. Kenneth Payne. “The Media as an Instrument of War.”
44. Kenneth Payne. “The Media as an Instrument of War.”
45. Tom Regan. “U.S. military planting stories in Iraqi papers.” Christian Science
Monitor.com. December 1, 2005. See www.csmonitor.com/2005/1201/dailyUpdate.html
(July 15, 2007).
46. Tom Regan. “U.S. military planting stories in Iraqi papers.”
47. John Pilger. “The Real First Casualty of War.” Lewrockwell. April 21, 2006. See
www.lewrockwell.com/pilger/pilger40.html (July 15, 2007).
48. Dave Edwards. “Beating up the cheerleader.” Znet. July 29, 2003. See www
.zmag.org/Sustainers/Content/2003-07/29edwards.cfm (July 15, 2007).
49. Dave Edwards. “Beating up the cheerleader.”
50. Dave Edwards. “Beating up the cheerleader.”
51. Jebediah Reed. “The Iraq Gamble: At the pundits’ table, the losing bet still
takes the pot.” Radar Magazine. January 2007. See www.radarmagazine.come/features
/2007/01/betting_on (July 15, 2007).
52. Frank Rich. “Operation Iraqi Infoganda.” New York Times. March 28, 2004.
53. Robert Love. “Before Jon Stewart.”Columbia Journalism Review. March/April
2007. See www.cjr.org/feature/before_jon_stewart.php (July 15, 2007).
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54. Norman Solomon. “The Military-Industrial-Media Complex: Why war is covered from the warriors’ perspective.” FAIR/Extra! July/August 2005. See www.fair.org
/index .php?pag e=2627 (July 15, 2007).
55. Steve Rendall and Tara Broughel. “Amplifying Officials, Squelching Dissent
FAIR study finds democracy poorly served by war coverage.” FAIR Extra. May/June
2003. See www.fair.org/index.php?page=1145 (July 15, 2007).
56. Norman Solomon. “The Military-Industrial-Media Complex: Why war is covered from the warriors’ perspective.”
57. Guy Reel. “The Military-Mass Media Complex.” CommonDreams.org. May 6,
2004. See www.commondreams.org/views04/0506-06.htm (July 15, 2007).
58. Norman Solomon. “Media and the Politics of Empathy.” CommonDreams.org.
April 18, 2003. See www.commondreams.org/views03/0418-08.htm (July 15, 2007).
59. FAIR. “Networks Accept Government Guidance.” FAIR. October 12, 2001.
<http://www.fair.org/press-releases/network-pressure.html> (July 15, 2007).
60. Media Tank. “Ties That Bind: An Assortment of Interlocking Interests.” Media Tank. See www.mediatank.org/resources/peace/conflicts/ (July 15, 2007).
61. Ben H. Bagdikian. The Media Monopoly, Sixth Edition. New York: Beacon
Press, 2000.
62. Robert Parry. “The Price of the Liberal Media Myth.” Consortiumnews.com.
January 1 2003. See consortiumnews.com/2002/123102a.html (July 15, 2007).
63. Roy Greenslade. “Their Masters’Voice.” The Guardian. February 17, 2003.
64. Center for American Progress. “Who is Rupert Murdoch?” July 16, 2004. See
www.americanprogress.org/issues/2004/07/b122948.html (July 15, 2007).
65. Margo Kingston. “Murdoch’s War on Truth in War Reporting.” Sydney Morning Herald. April 7, 2003. See www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/04/07/1049567619708
.html (July 15, 2007).
66. Margo Kingston. “Murdoch’s War on Truth in War Reporting.”
67. Richard Neville. “Rupert Murdoch’s Victims.” Counter Punch. September 1,
2006. See www.counterpunch.org/neville09012006.html (July 15, 2007).
68. Media Matters for America. “33 internal FOX editorial memos reviewed by
MMFA reveal FOX News Channel’s inner workings.” July 14, 2004. See mediamatters
.org/items/200407140002 (July 15, 2007).
69. Gary Kamiya. “Iraq: Why the Media Failed.”
70. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent.
71. Jon Prestage. “Mainstream Journalism: Shredding the First Amendment.”
Truthout. November 7, 2002. See www.truthout.org/doc_02/11.11.shred.1.amend.htm
(July 15, 2007).
72. Darrell Satzman. “Advertising likely to wane against a backdrop of battle.” Los
Angeles Business Journal. Feb 3, 2003.
73. Deborah Johns and Michelle Souza. “Letter from CA Marine Moms & Military Families.” posted on Marooned in Marin. See maroonedinmarin.blogspot.com
/2006/06/kfbk-goes-liberal-fires-mark-williams.html (July 15, 2007).
74. New York Times. “MTV Refuses Antiwar Commercial.” New York Times. March
13, 2003.
Media March to War 187
75. New York Times. “MTV Refuses Antiwar Commercial.”
76. Barbara Leiterman. “The Ascendancy of Conrad Black.” FAIR Extra. November/
December 1996.
77. FAIR press release. “Who’s on the News: study shows network news sources
skew white male and elite.” FAIR. January 1, 2001. See www.fair.org/index.php?
page=1865 (July 15, 2001).
78. Steve Rendall and Tara Broughel. “Amplifying Officials, Squelching Dissent.”
79. Robert W. McChesney. “Journalism, Democracy, and Class Struggle.” Monthly
Review. Volume 52, Number 6, 2000.
80. Steve Rendall and Tara Broughel. “Amplifying Officials, Squelching Dissent.”
81. Trudy Lieberman. Slanting the Story: the Forces That Shape the News. New York:
The New Press, 2000.
82. Trudy Lieberman. Slanting the Story.
83. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent.
84. Steve Rendall and Tara Broughel. “Amplifying Officials, Squelching Dissent.”
85. Steve Rendall and Tara Broughel. “Amplifying Officials, Squelching Dissent.”
86. Julia Day. “US media at ‘all-time low’.” The Guardian. February 2, 2006.
87. Robert W. McChesney. “Journalism, Democracy, and Class Struggle.”
88. Ben H. Bagdikian. The Media Monopoly.
89. Rick Ellis. “The Surrender Of MSNBC.” AllYourTV.com. Wednesday, February 26, 2003. See www.commondreams.org/views03/0226-11.htm (July 15, 2007).
90. Media Matters for America. “Phil Donahue on his 2003 MSNBC firing.” October 29, 2004. <http://mediamatters.org/items/200410290004> (July 15, 2007).
91. BBC NEWS. “Veteran CBS News Anchor Dan Rather speaks out.” BBC
Newsnight May 16, 2002. See www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2002
/05_may/16/dan_rather .shtml (July 15, 2007).
92. PEW. “Self Censorship: How Often and Why. Journalists Avoiding the News.”
PEW Research center for People and the Press. April 30, 2000. See people-press.org
/reports/dislay .php3?ReportID=39 (July 15, 2007).
93. Leilani Sweeney. “Americans’confidence in military news coverage takes
steep drop.” Mccormick Tribune. August 24, 2005. See www.mccormicktribune.org
/news/2005/pr082405.aspx (July 15, 2007).
94. Robert Hackett. “Covering up the “War on Terrorism.” Canadian Association
of Journalists. See www.caj.ca/mediamag/fall2001/analysis.html (July 15, 2007).
95. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky. Manufacturing Consent.
96. Center for Social Media. “Journalists became icons of sentimental patriotism.”
2002. See www.centerforsocialmedia.org/challengestojournalism.html (July 27, 2007).
97. PEW. “Self Censorship: How Often and Why. Journalists Avoiding the News.”
PEW Research center for People and the Press. April 30, 2000. See people-press.org
/reports/dislay .php3?ReportID=39 (July 15, 2007).
98. James Sandrolini. “Propaganda: The Art of War.” Chicago Media Watch. Fall
2002. See www.chicagomediawatch.org/02_3_artofwar.shtml (July 15, 2007).
99. Amy Goodman. “Interview.” Hardball with Chris Matthews, MSNBC. December 3, 2004. See www.democracynow.org/hardball-041203.shtml (July 15, 2007).
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100. Robert Jensen. “Dan Rather’s the Problem with Patriotism: Steps toward the
redemption of American journalism and democracy.” Global Media Journal, 2: 3 (Fall
2003).
101. Jim Rutenberg. “Cable’s War Coverage Suggests a New ‘Fox Effect’ on Television.” New York Times. April 16, 2003.
102. Stephen Labatan, Lorne Manly and Elizabeth Jensen. “Republican Chairman Exerts Pressure on PBS, Alleging Biases.” New York Times. May 2, 2005.
103. Jim Rutenberg. “Cable’s War Coverage Suggests a New ‘Fox Effect’ on Television.”
104. Jim Rutenberg. “Cable’s War Coverage Suggests a New ‘Fox Effect’ on Television.”
105. Steve Ritea. “Accolades now come to Knight Ridder for its prescient reports
expressing skepticism about claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.”
American Journalism Review. August/September 2004.
106. Steve Ritea. “Accolades now come to Knight Ridder.”
107. Julian Borger . “‘I feel like I did in the Vietnam days—I hate to pay taxes just
so they can go and bomb more people.’” The Guardian. April 14, 2006.
108. Bonnie Azab Powell. “Investigative journalist Seymour Hersh spills the secrets of the Iraq quagmire and the war on terror.” University of California Berkeley
NewsCenter. October 11, 2004. See www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2004/10
/11_hersh.shtml (July 15, 2007).
109. Julia Day. “US media at ‘all-time low’.”
110. John Pilger. “Recommends the World Wide Web.” New Statesman. November 28, 2005. See www.newstatesman.com/200511280013 (July 15, 2007).
111. Robert Fisk. “The US Press in Iraq: Hotel Room Journalism.” Counter Punch.
January 17, 2005. See www.counterpunch.org/fisk01172005.html (July 15, 2007).
112. Robert Fisk. “The US Press in Iraq: Hotel Room Journalism.”
113. Lizzy Ratner. “Amy Goodman’s ‘Empire’.” The Nation. May 5, 2005. See
www.thenation.com/doc/20050523/ratner (July 15, 2007).
114. Lizzy Ratner. “Amy Goodman’s ‘Empire’.” The Nation. May 5, 2005. See
www.thenation.com/doc/20050523/ratner (July 15, 2007).
115. Ellen Knickmeyer. “ Memories of a Massacre:Iraqi Townspeople Describe
Slaying of 24 Civilians by Marines in Nov. 19 Incident.” Washington Post. May 27,
2006.
116. Dana Priest. “CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons.
117. PBS. “Media Wars.” PBS Frontline series. See www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline
/newswar/view (July 15, 2007).
118. PBS. “Media Wars.”
119. Julia Day. “US media at ‘all time low’.”
C H A P T E R
E I G H T
Boiling the Blood and Narrowing
the Mind: Fomenting Backlash
Since 9/11, every time there is an incident overseas attributed to Muslims or Arabs, we go on orange alert ourselves.
—Sohail Mohammed1
“It’s a bad time to be named Ahmed,” jokes comedian Ahmed Ahmed. This
is especially true at airports and border crossings: the New York Times observes that “travelling makes many Muslim Americans feel like second-class
citizens.”2 The experience is so widespread that it has come to be a staple of
Muslim-American satire: Ahmed travels “wearing a T-shirt that says “Got
Rights?’”3 Stand-up comic Azhar Usman who, despite pressure, refuses to
shave the long beard that denotes “someone trying to live a religious life,”
jokes in the comedy revue “Allah Made Me Funny” that it’s ironic his “obviously Muslim appearance” associates him with terrorism: “If I were a crazy
Muslim fundamentalist, this is not the disguise I would go with.”4
There is, however, a sobering reality behind the wry comedy. Like Ahmed
Ahmed, Taleb Salhab and his wife were taken away in handcuffs while traveling. The sound-track to their detention at the Port Huron border crossing,
however, was not the murmur of curious fellow travelers, nor the laughter of
a comedy-club audience, but the wailing of their two pre-school daughters,
who watched from the car as their parents were dragged away in restraints,
with no explanation from customs officials, for four hours of questioning. It
was harrowing for the children, says Salhab, describing how “officers, their
hands on their guns, swarmed around his vehicle, barking at him to get out
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as alarm bells clanged.” He feared for his life, said Salhab, adding that now
whenever his four-year-old daughter “sees uniformed officers, she asks if they
are going to take him away.”5
The response of comedians such as Ahmed and Usman to the denial of
fundamental civil liberties is a generous one. It takes a bitter situation and
turns it into humane laughter, simultaneously satirizing the fear-driven behavior shaping their daily experience and inviting a critical re-examination
of those fears. Salhab’s more poignant story suggests a different potential reaction: the inchoate terror of children made to witness their parents’ humiliation, too young to detect irony, too fearful to be able to take control of the
experience by re-casting it as comedic performance. Such situations will almost inevitably brew a potent mixture of helplessness, fear and rage; what
will happen if we continually steep our youngest, most impressionable citizens in such a bitter brew? When we act out of a need to heighten our sense
of security, we must be alert to the implications of our actions; through trying so rigorously to manage risk, are we ironically setting up the very conditions of outrage and impotence which create it? According to many foreignpolicy analysts, the answer is yes. The Terrorism Index, a gauge of progress in
the war on terror developed by the journal Foreign Policy and the Center for
American Progress, finds that foreign-policy experts “see a world that is
growing more dangerous, a national security strategy in disarray, and a war in
Iraq that is alarmingly off-track.”6 The consequences of our social, political,
and discursive choices are simply too significant to overlook.
Fatally interconnected, war and racism fuel each other.7 Racism feeds
war’s atrocities, offering us a perverse permission to punish demonized others
not so much for their actions as for their difference. War, in turn, supports
racism’s most dangerous assumptions about that difference, urging that our
best hope for security lies in eradicating it in any of its guises: soldier or civilian, villain or victim, adult or child. Ironically, the more racism feeds fear’s
voice, telling us that our very nature, civilization, and identity are under attack because “they hate us,”8 the more annihilating our wars become in response; thus we generate the very hatred we most resent. President Bush’s
cultivation of national fears by “portraying himself as the defender of ‘Western civilization,’” says the Committee Against Anti-Asian Violence, is only
the most recent expression of a “deep-rooted” pattern of “U.S. governments
using racism to build support for colonial wars of conquest.”9 It is perhaps inevitable that the violence of 9/11 and the violence of the subsequent war on
terror have, taken together, created a double-edged backlash. One blade
strikes internally at Arab-Americans and Muslims in a retaliatory rage fostered by insistently racist government and media discourses, and generating
Boiling the Blood and Narrowing the Mind 191
its own terror among its victims. The other blade strikes internationally, as
Western policies, hardened and intensified by fears of terrorist threats, generate resentment by those they knowingly or unknowingly victimize.
The first type of backlash can be most clearly detected in the rise of hate
crimes against immigrants and North Americans of Middle Eastern origin.
According to a Zogby Survey, 75 percent of American Muslims reported that
they or someone they knew have been subject to harassment and discrimination since 9/11.10 The European Monitoring Centre for Racism and Xenophobia documented many counts of verbal abuse blaming all Muslims for the
attacks, as well as women having their hijab torn from their heads, male and
female Muslims assaulted.11 In Canada, mosques are vandalized, and
Canada’s Muslim and Arab communities experience insults, threats, attacks,
and intolerance. Inaccurate reporting about them, Muslims believe, derives
from and re-creates misinformation and stereotypes. Switch on the television, says a Pakistani-Dutch sociologist, Mustafa Hassain, “and you have the
impression that Muslims are all fanatics, that Muslims don’t understand
Western liberal values.”12 Many Muslims agree that the Western media is
preoccupied less with Islam than with its own false stereotypes. Sheikh
Ahmed Kutty, Imam of the Islamic Foundation of Toronto, the largest Muslim center in Canada, says: The media “only seek evidence that confirms
their preconceived notions of Islam and Muslims.”13
One of the most insidious ways the media bigotry shows up is in linguistically denying Muslim-Canadian identity. Journalist Robert Fisk points out
how the Canadian press has begun calling Canadian Muslims suspected of terrorist activities “Canadian-born” or “home-grown” rather than Canadians:
“The vicious insinuation is that Muslim-Canadians are not really citizens.”14
A 2002 survey found that 60 percent of Canadian Muslims experienced discrimination following 9/11 and 82 percent knew of at least one fellow Muslim who had received this treatment. Paralleling this is the increased use of
racial profiling, supported in the minds of the public, governments, and security by years of media stereotyping that continually linked Islam and the Middle East to terrorism. As early as 1991, an ABC News poll revealed 59 percent
of Americans saw Arabs as “terrorists,” while 58 percent saw them as “violent”
and 56 percent as “religious fanatics.”15 A Gallup poll conducted two years
later found that two-thirds of Americans believed there were “too many”
Arab immigrants. The 9/11 attacks reinforced and furthered these views, solidifying the connection of Middle Eastern violence, terrorism, religious fanaticism. Civil rights lawyer Alia Malek describes watching “brown” Americans, anxious about reprisals following terrorist attacks, “rushing to affirm
their allegiance and their American-ness,” apologizing for the tragedy “as if we
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share the blame.”16 This anxiety is “not just collective hysteria,” says Malek,
referencing a recent Boston Globe survey showed “almost half of all Americans think Arabs in this country should carry special identification cards,” and
an Associated Press poll that one-third of Americans surveyed “support the
creation of internment camps.”17 Islamophobia is so widespread in Europe
that columnist Ziauddin Sardar wonders whether Muslims will be the victims
of the next pogroms.18 Rather than being publically denounced by politicians,
political rhetoric often invited such views. Former U.S. senator Rick Santorum, for example, told an audience of university students that “radical Islam
is as dangerous a threat to the U.S. as Nazi Germany to Britain in 1940,” and
warned of “Islamic fascists” who want to conquer the world.19 The widespread
public discourse of infiltration and infestation cements such fears. The media’s
emphasis on “sleepers,” or terrorist plants who assume an unremarkable
American life until “activated,” is one aspect of the infiltration trope. Malek
describes another aspect: days after 9/11, Washington, D.C. buses ran Washington Mutual ads with a picture of a Middle Eastern man and the caption,
“Worry About Your New Neighbors, Not About Your Loan.” These messages
made clear, says Malek, that the “Arab enemies among us” might seen civilized, “but in the end their ultimate allegiance is our destruction.”20
In 1997, England’s Runnymede Trust, a policy research organization promoting multiculturalism, investigated Islamophobia in the UK. Islamophobia, it notes, assumes at root that Islam is innately alien, barbaric, resistant
to change and aggressively anti-Western. Many prominent western leaders
speak from an Islamophobic stance: influential televangelist Pat Robertson,
for example, equates Muslims with termites “destroying institutions that
have been built by Christians.”21 Echoing an exterminationist rhetoric familiar from military propaganda, but more startling in the mouth of a man of
faith, Robertson warns, “the time has arrived for a godly fumigation.”22 Former Southern Baptist Convention president Reverend Jerry Vines blames
America’s problems on religious pluralism; speaking at a pastors’ conference
in 2002, he called Islam’s founder “a demon-possessed pedophile”; only the
Christian God, he claimed, is “not going to turn you into a terrorist that’ll
try to bomb people.”23 Vines’ comments dismayed the Council of AmericanIslamic Relations (CAIR): “It’s really unfortunate that a top leader in a
mainstream Christian church would use such hate-filled and bigoted language in describing the faith of one-fifth of the world’s population.”24
Cultures of Fear
Racial profiling assumes certain racial minorities have proclivities to certain
criminal acts. CAIR’s 2005 report, “Unequal Protection: The Status of Mus-
Boiling the Blood and Narrowing the Mind 193
lim Civil Rights in the United States,” notes that of the 1,552 incidents of
anti-Muslim violence, discrimination, and harassment it documents in 2004,
nearly 25 percent were unwarranted arrests and police searches, as compared
to only 7 percent in the year previous.25 In Racial Profiling after September 11,
Kevin Johnson notes that: “Non-citizen Arabs and Muslims were subjected to
special scrutiny at airports across the country and a new phrase, “Flying While
Arab,” entered the national vocabulary.”26 “Flying While Arab” is the War on
Terror’s version of “Driving While Black,” which describes the tendency of
police to pull over African-American drivers without evidence of criminal activity. An Arab-sounding name can now be enough to raise red flags at airport
check-in counters. At New York’s Kennedy airport, The New York Times reported, law enforcement officers searched passengers based on race: “Anyone
with dark skin or who spoke with an accent was taken aside and searched,”
one passenger said, as was “any male with too much facial hair.”27
The same assumptions have prompted physical and verbal abuse, often
targeting individuals who only appear to be Arab or Muslim. Many victims
of anti-terrorist anger have been people of Indian origin, especially devout
male members of the Sikh community who wear a turban; nine days after
9/11, U.S. Representative John Cooksey told a radio audience that anyone
“wearing a diaper on his head” should expect to be interrogated about the attacks. Cooksey later acknowledged that some of those wearing turbans are
American citizens, and that not everyone wearing a turban is Arab or Muslim, “but bin Laden does,” he insisted. “Bin Laden always wears a turban, and
I think a lot of his followers—if they were not based here and trying to blend
into our society—would be wearing them, too.”28
The terrorist attacks in the U.S. in 2001 and the subway bombings in London in 2005 allowed authorities to suspend many democratic rights. The U.S.
Patriot Act and Britain’s Terrorism Bill have, by permitting legal principles to
be breached in the name of combating terrorism, given “police unfettered
powers to act as judge, jury and executioner” as Bill Van Auken reports in an
article about the victims of “state ‘anti-terror’ killings.”29 Van Auken describes
the death of Brazilian immigrant Jean Charles de Menezes, gunned down by
plainclothes police on a London subway. Many inconsistencies arose between
independent accounts and the police version of events; police initially reported that de Menezes was seen leaving the home of a suspected terrorist and
wearing a bulky jacket on a warm day, leading them to suspect he was carrying a bomb. They claimed to have challenged him at the entrance to the subway station, whereupon he fled; he was shot to prevent him from detonating
a bomb. Van Auken contradicts this version, insisting de Menezes lived in a
different apartment than the terrorist suspects, was not wearing a heavy coat,
and was never challenged by police. Instead, he was seated in the subway car
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when, without warning, he was seized and shot several times by police. After
it became apparent that they had killed an innocent man, explanations were
created to exonerate the officers and “uphold the infallibility of the security
forces.”30 The killing was defended as inevitable collateral damage in the
global war on terror. Such things are necessary, we are told, in order to keep
us safe.
Governments have institutionalized discrimination through racial profiling and race-based travel restrictions. Many civilians have been severely injured or incarcerated based on suspicions, however flimsy, that they are terrorists. After the 9/11 attacks, Johnson writes that “hundreds of Arab and
Muslim non-citizens were arrested, questioned, detained, and deported” in a
“dragnet” that often netted South Asian Sikhs and Latin American Christians as well as innocent Arab Muslims.31 The victims of mistaken identity
have little recourse.
Amidst a climate of fear, hostility, and suspicion, the loss of fundamental
civil liberties affects all American citizens. The rising intolerance for criticism of American international policy is analogous, says the American Civil
Liberties Union (ACLU)’s Nadine Strossen, to the rise of McCarthyism in
the 1950s: “The term ‘terrorism’ is taking on the same kind of characteristics
as the term ‘communism’ did in the 1950s. It stops people in their tracks, and
they’re willing to give up their freedoms. . . . They are too willing to give up
their rights and to scapegoat people, especially immigrants and people who
criticize the war.”32 As in McCarthyism, political conformity is now replacing freedom of speech, threatening and silencing voices of dissent. Matthew
Rothschild documents cases of government agencies harassing artists and activists, as when the Art Car Museum’s show “Secret Wars” was inspected by
officials from the FBI and Secret Service, who took notes on the artists, and
“things that they thought were negative.” They asked the museum’s frightened tour guide “if [her] parents knew if [she] worked at a place like this.”33
Another young woman, Durham Tech freshman A. J. Brown, found two
agents from the Secret Service at her door one evening, announcing “We’re
here because we have a report that you have un-American material in your
apartment.” They inspected her political posters, including a Pink Floyd
poster bearing the phrase “Mother should I trust the government?” took information, and asked her if she had “any pro-Taliban stuff” in her apartment.
They also asked if it were true that her mother was in the armed forces. “Obviously,” said Brown, “I’m on some list somewhere.”34 Welcome, says Rothschild, to the era of the New McCarthyism.
Intensified security requirements cultivate a constant sense of danger.
They create a culture of fear that requires that adults and children alike be
Boiling the Blood and Narrowing the Mind 195
constantly vigilant to the reality of a new terrorist threat, a threat immediate and palpable yet simultaneously vague and abstract. In contrast to the
amorphous enemy, the new security measures are reassuringly concrete. The
threat of terrorism becomes inseparable from a generalized sense of fear. In
cultures of fear, people often end up accepting social contracts infringing on
personal freedoms and democratic rights in exchange for an increased sense
of security. Extraordinary measures in the name of national security have
alienated many citizens domestically, while weakened individual rights and
respect for international law has undermined North America’s moral authority to speak out against human rights violations in other parts of the world.35
Fomenting a Racist War against the Developing World
Flouting international law and the Geneva conventions has earned the U.S.
widespread animosity. Irene Khan, Secretary General of Amnesty International, states that “Through short sighted, fear-mongering and divisive policies, governments are undermining the rule of law and human rights, feeding
racism and xenophobia, dividing communities, intensifying inequalities and
sowing the seeds for more violence and conflict.”36
The resulting global and domestic anger will take a long time to heal. The
war on terror has ironically become a form of terror, generating its own backlash. As long as the mainstream media persist in painting all Muslims as terrorists and implicitly supporting the violence perpetrated upon them, those
who see their faith and culture under siege by the West have ample evidence
of a modern-day crusade against Islam. The Arab world is continually reinforced in its “feeling that there is a deep racism underlying the occupiers’ attitudes to Arabs, Muslims and the Third World generally.”37 At the same
time new technologies mean that “graphic digital evidence of these losses
and humiliations is available to anyone with a computer,” says Naomi Klein,
evidence that creates a “lethal cocktail of racism and torture” that is “burning through the veins of angry young men.”38 To mask our role in creating
this rage, politicians re-cast it as an expression of the clash of civilizations,
claiming that “they hate us for our freedoms.” A 2004 report from a federal
advisory committee for the U.S. Secretary of Defense noted explicitly that
“Muslims do not hate our freedom, but rather they hate our policies.”39
America’s one-sided support of Israel and lack of concern for the rights of
Palestinians are contentious for Muslims, as is its “long-standing, even increasing, support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most notably
in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan and the Gulf states. Thus, when
American public diplomacy talks about bringing democracy to Islamic societies, this is seen as no more than self-serving hypocrisy.”40
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While many in the West have been taught to regard Muslim anger and resentment towards the West as generalized and irrational, part of the inevitable
dynamic of hostile difference between East and West, it is actually a specific response to specific Western actions and policies. According to Chalmers Johnson, “to think that a colonial power can treat another people as subhuman,
steal their land, contain them in open-air prisons, detain their elected leaders,
and subject them to starvation and then express shock and dismay when the
poor wretches say something nasty . . . is the height of imperial hubris.”41
Acting out of this hubris, we create the conditions that give rise to “blowback,” a CIA term for the unintended consequences of the U.S. government’s international activities. Johnson accuses the U.S. of engaging in “blatant displays of global hegemony” through “organizations they control”42
such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization and
the World Bank, each targeted by anti-globalization and anti-poverty protesters because of lending policies detrimental to impoverished countries.
The war on terror has caused many formerly-indifferent or even pro-Western
Arabs to become sympathetic to the terrorists or even engage in terrorist acts
themselves. The destruction of their homes and infrastructure, the loss of
livelihood, and the lack of progress in rebuilding has angered Iraqis. The
senseless deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis, all of whom
leave behind grieving families and friends, has ensured that rage and loss will
create new terrorists to replace those captured or killed. As a result, the
threat of terrorism has indisputably grown despite the harsh military crackdown on suspected terrorists at home and abroad.
What underlies the war on terror, according to David du Bois, is “the conviction among white Americans that people of color are inherently inferior to
whites and are therefore capable of committing, indeed eager to commit, the
most heinous of crimes against ‘the hated and envied European/American.’”43
Such racist attitudes do not go unnoticed in the rest of the world; as Klein observes, “Racism is the terrorists’ greatest recruitment tool.” She reports that
Hussein Osman, apprehended in connection to the 2005 failed bombing attempt in London, told police that he prepared for the mission by watching
films on the war in Iraq, “especially those where women and children were being killed and exterminated by British and American soldiers.”44 This suggests
“a possible motive for acts of terror against the UK: rage at perceived extreme
racism.” And what else, asks Klein, can we call the belief “that American and
European lives are worth more than the lives of Arabs and Muslims, so much
more that their deaths in Iraq are not even counted?”45
A bitter irony lies at the heart of all this: indisputably, it seems, our national insecurities about the state of national security has made us signifi-
Boiling the Blood and Narrowing the Mind 197
cantly less secure. This is not speculation: American intelligence officials
agree that “the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse.”46 The
New York Times reports that American intelligence agencies now concur that
the invasion and occupation of Iraq have “helped spawn a new generation of
Islamic radicalism,” resulting in a significant increase in the “overall terrorist
threat.”47 Eighty percent of foreign-policy experts participating in the Terrorism Index report assert that the war in Iraq has had a negative effect “on protecting the American people from global terrorist networks and in advancing
U.S. national security goals.”48 Significantly, 30 percent of those analysts rank
the project of “winning the hearts and minds” of the Muslim world as the
most urgent U.S. policy objective for the next five years, as opposed to only
15 percent who consider creating a “stable, secure Iraq” the most essential endeavor. The sense of the pressing consequence of the war in Iraq is shared
among many expert observers. “The National Intelligence Estimate attributes
a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by
the House Intelligence Committee,” writes Mark Mazzetti, asserting that
since the beginning of the war on terror, “Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe,” resulting in a “diffusion of jihad ideology.”49 Ironically, the same seeds of the attitudes about
race that underlie our aggression in Iraq and are “exacerbating domestic conflicts” and “fomenting radical ideologies” can be found in the language of the
New York Times article that is earnestly exposing its dangers. When Islamic
radicalism is represented in the article as something that, like vermin,
“spawns,” or that, like cancer “metastasizes and spreads,” we find ourselves almost before we’re aware of it enmeshed in the same dehumanizing metaphors
that shape our perspectives, bind our thinking, and limit our responses. As the
Intelligence Estimate’s grim survey of heightened terrorist threat makes clear,
the consequences of allowing such metaphors to govern our thinking and our
policies are not abstract, but terrifyingly concrete.
Notes
1. Masnet and News Agencies. “Beheadings in Iraq and Saudi Arabia Fuel Backlash Against American Muslims.” Muslim American Society. June 25, 2004. See www
.masnet.org/news.asp?id=1329 (July 22, 2007).
2. Neil MacFarguhar. “U.S. Muslims Say Terror Fears Hamper Their Right to
Travel.” New York Times. June 1, 2006.
3. Neil MacFarguhar. “U.S. Muslims Say Terror Fears Hamper Their Right to
Travel.”
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4. Neil MacFarguhar. “U.S. Muslims Say Terror Fears Hamper Their Right to
Travel.”
5. Neil MacFarguhar. “U.S. Muslims Say Terror Fears Hamper Their Right to
Travel.”
6. Foreign Policy. “The Terrorism Index.” Foreign Policy. September/October
2007.
7. Racial Justice. “Mission Statement.”Racial Justice. See racialjustice911.org
/homehk.htm (July 17, 2007).
8. George W. Bush. “Address to a Joint Session of Congress and the American
People.” The White House.gov. See www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/2001
0920-8.html (July 17, 2007).
9. Racial Justice. “Mission Statement.”
10. Abdul Malik Mujahid. “Demonization of Muslims Caused the Iraq Abuse.”
Sound Vision. May 19, 2004. See www.soundvision.com/info/peace/demonization.asp
(July 17, 2007).
11. C. Allen and J. S. Nielsen. “Summary report on Islamophobia in the EU after
11 September 2001.” European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia. Vienna,
Austria, 2002.
12. Mustafa Hassain cited in Geoffrey Wheatcroft. “Cartoon Characters: Whose
fault is it that the media presents Muslims as fanatics?” Slate. February 9, 2006.
13. Ahmed Kutty cited in Faisal Kutty. “Canada’s Nearly 400,000 Muslims Concerned about Media Stereotypes.” Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October
1993: 54.
14. New Socialist. “Racism, the Right and the Toronto ‘Terrorism.’” New Socialist
See www.newsocialist.org/newsite/index.php?id=988 (July 23, 2007).
15. Steven W. Bender. “Sight, Sound, and Stereotype: The War on Terrorism and
Its Consequences for Latinas/os.” Oregon Law Review. Vol. 81, 2002.
16. Alia Malek “Beware Thy neighbour?” John Hopkins Magazine. November
2001. See www.jhu.edu/~jhumag/1101web/ruminate.html (July 23, 2007).
17. Alia Malek “Beware Thy neighbour?”
18. Ziauddin Sardar. “The next holocaust.” New Statesman, December 5, 2005.
19. Irene Chen. “Forget the War on Terror.” Brown Alumni magazine. May/June
2007. See brownalumnimagazine.com/under-the-elm/forget_the_war_on-terror.html
(July 17, 2007).
20. Alia Malek. “Beware Thy neighbour?”
21. Pat Robertson. New York Magazine. August 18, 1986.
22. Pat Robertson. New York Magazine.
23. Allen G. Breed. “Muslims Angered by Comments at Gathering of Southern
Baptists.” Associated Press. June 9–10, 2002.
24. Allen G. Breed. “Muslims Angered by Comments at Gathering of Southern
Baptists.”
25. Cited in Jim Lobe. “Fear of Islam on the Rise—Muslim Group.” LewRockwell
.com. May 12, 2005. See www.lewrockwell.com/ips/lobe210.html (July 17, 2007).
Boiling the Blood and Narrowing the Mind 199
26. Kevin R. Johnson. “Racial Profiling after September 11: the Department of
Justice’s 2003 Guidelines.” Loyola Law Review, Spring 2004.
27. Damien Cave. “Round up the usual suspects: How far should ethnic profiling
go in the quest to nab the World Trade Center terrorists?” Salon. Sept. 14, 2001. See
archive.salon .com/news/feature/2001/09/14/profiling/ (July 17, 2001).
28. Joan Mckinney. “Cooksey: Expect racial profiling.” Advocate. September 19,
2001.
29. Bill Van Auken. “Rigoberto Alpizar and Jean Charles de Menezes: Two victims
of state “anti-terror” killings.” World Socialist Website. December 12, 2005. See www
.wsws.org/articles/2005/dec2005/kill-d12.shtml (July 17, 2007).
30. Bill Van Auken. “Rigoberto Alpizar and Jean Charles de Menezes.”
31. Kevin R. Johnson. “Racial Profiling after September 11: the Department of
Justice’s 2003 Guidelines.” Loyola Law Review, Spring 2004.
32. Matthew Rothschild. “The New McCarthyism.” Progressive. January 2002. See
www.progressive.org/0901/roth0102.html (July 23, 2007).
33. Matthew Rothschild. “The New McCarthyism.”
34. Matthew Rothschild. “The New McCarthyism.”
35. Irene Khan, “Security for Whom? A Human Rights Response.” Amnesty International. 2003. See web.amnesty.org/report2003/message-eng (July 20, 2007).
36. Amnesty International. “Politics of Fear Creating a Dangerously Divided
World.” Amnesty International Press Release. May 23, 2007.
37. Norman Solomon. “This War and Racism.” Z. June 2004.
38. Naomi Klein. “Terror’s Greatest Recruitment Tool.” The Nation. August 29,
2005.
39. Tom Regan. “They hate our policies, not our freedom: Pentagon report contains
major criticisms of administration.” Christian Science Monitor. November 29, 2004.
40. Marjorie Cohn. “Chickens Come Home to Roost.” Truthout. December 7,
2004. See www.truthout.org/docs_04/120704A.shtml (July 22, 2007).
41. Chalmers Johnson. Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire.
New York: Henry Holt, 2000.
42. Chalmers Johnson. Blowback.
43. David Graham du Bois. “A War Like NO Other? You Bet!” Black Electorate
.com. November 27, 2001. See www.blackelectorate.com/articles.asp?ID=492 (July
23, 2007).
44. Naomi Klein. “Terror’s Greatest Recruitment Tool.”
45. Naomi Klein. “Terror’s Greatest Recruitment Tool.”
46. Mark Mazzetti. “Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat.” New
York Times. September 24, 2006.
47. Mark Mazzetti. “Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat.”
48. Mark Mazzetti. “Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat.”
49. Mark Mazzetti. “Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terrorism Threat.”
C H A P T E R
N I N E
Talking Our Way to Peace:
New Metaphors for Change
The nature of society is measured in part by the kind of metaphors it induces or allows . . . by our metaphors you shall know us.
—Trevor Barnes and James Duncan1
The Wolves We Feed
Terrorism, clearly, is never justifiable. Terrorism undermines the security and
peace of a country; creates suspicion towards others of different ethnicity;
devastates families; disrupts economies and causes governments to divert resources into the military rather than investing in education, health care or
housing. Eradicating terrorism is an important goal, but terrorism is, at root,
such a complex phenomenon that no simple or reductive approach can ever
successfully accomplish this. Instead, we need to examine terrorism and its
contexts, and the public and media rhetoric surrounding it. To end terrorism,
it must first be understood. Attempts to understand it have existed since well
before the events of 9/11. In August 1996, U.S. president Bill Clinton proclaimed to an audience at George Washington University that “Terrorism is
the enemy of our generation.”2 Five years before the fall of the twin towers,
acts of terrorism were seen as something largely limited to strife-torn areas
like the Middle East or Northern Ireland. Clinton’s comment foreshadowed
both the rapid spread of global terrorism and the intensification of public discourse addressing it. While notorious earlier cases like the Unabomber, the
1993 attack on the World Trade Center, the Oklahoma City bombing, and
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the Columbine shootings caused public comment and distress, it was not until September 2001 that talk about terrorism began to permeate the media in
a manner so discursively charged that it shaped both public opinion and the
domestic and foreign policies of several countries, none more so the U.S. Because of the far-reaching ramifications of both terrorism and the dangerous
discourses surrounding it, we need to develop a metaphoric frame that will
allow us to fruitfully “unpack” terrorism, so that we may understand, through
an enlarged and nuanced comprehension the weighty freight it carries.
Stephen R. Shalom explicitly links such an understanding to the necessity
for productively addressing terrorism. In Confronting Terrorism and the War,
Shalom states, “Sometimes when we examine terrorist acts—whether smallscale, like Columbine, or large-scale, like September 11—we will find that
the terror breeds on legitimate grievances. When this is the case, addressing
those grievances will be the most sensible way to reduce the likelihood of a
recurrence of the terrorism.”3
It is not without precedent that we seek such understanding through investigation and discussion. As Shalom notes, when Eric Harris and Dylan
Klebold methodically shot fellow Columbine High School students before
taking their own lives, officials and observers tried to understand what led
the two teens to commit this act of violence. We did not excuse the killings,
Shalom explains, nor did we justify them. But we did hope that “by understanding what happened we could take steps to reduce the likelihood of
recurrence—perhaps designing programs to reduce alienation among
teenagers or to make students more tolerant of those who don’t fit in or making it more difficult for kids to obtain guns.”
The discourses through which we publicly discuss terrorism, however, are
largely not helping us to understand it. Instead of looking at each case and taking steps to comprehend or address specific contexts, situations or grievances,
we have instead attempted to eradicate terrorism through the blunt instruments
of force and the suspension of civil liberties. Examining the way terrorism is discussed in the mainstream media and government statements shows that understanding terrorism and its roots and contexts is not foremost on the agenda. The
persistent vocabulary that dominates the rhetoric of public discussion of terrorism creates a picture, sometimes subtle, sometimes overwhelmingly clear, of
Arab terrorists as essentially alien, fundamentally different from us. The more
dissimilar this image is from our image of ourselves, the easier it is to dehumanize the enemy-Other and, by association, others of their community. The consequences of that dehumanization, as this book documents, can be deadly not
just for the dehumanized Other but for our own diminishing security, a security
ill-served by the metaphoric frames that re-engender violence.
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203
Calls for understanding of the contexts, conflicts, and productions of terrorism are often criticized by those embracing the war metaphor. They are denounced as, at best, weak, self-indulgent, and soft, at worst, as traitorous and
self-destructive. Another way of considering this call for understanding, however, might see it as by far the more difficult and more rigorous road of response,
one vastly more challenging and demanding than the relatively straightforward route of military response. At what is hard not to see as a crossroads in
our political landscape, the path we choose at this juncture will resonate inescapably into our future. It might be worth remembering the Native American teaching story featuring an elder who tells his grandchildren that every human has within them two wolves engaged in fierce battle; one represents fear,
anger, resentment, greed arrogance, lies, pride and ego, and the other peace,
joy, friendship, empathy, truth, and compassion. When asked by his grandchild
which wolf will win the battle, the elder replies, whichever one you feed.4 If
this is so, then we would do well to choose our metaphoric language with care,
since metaphors can provide potent nourishment.
Changing our Metaphors and Language
Metaphor offers us a unique index to our ideas and assumptions, at once reflecting and shaping the spectrum of our values. The role of metaphor and
the discourses it sustains are so fundamental that, as E. L. Doctorow has argued, “The development of civilizations is essentially a progression of
metaphors.”5 Our cultural lexicon of dehumanizing metaphor is remarkably
enduring; not only has it colonized discussion of the war on terror, it has permeated our public conversations about other denigrated or marginalized
groups. The rat metaphor, in particular, creeps eagerly into many discourses
of judgment: an article in The 13th, a right-wing Catholic newspaper, claims
that “Homosexuals, like rats, are crawling out of their holes, only to be fed
lovingly by church people and politicians.”6 This language is echoed by an
American televangelist who said homosexuals are “like rats, skulking in their
closets, copulating in mad frenzies, unable to control their appetites, sniffing
around the doors of school classrooms for fresh prey.”7 Paul Cameron, chairman of the Family Research Institute, has advocated facial tattoos for AIDS
victims and the castration, deportation to a former leper colony, and even extermination of homosexuals.8 Vermin metaphors are also regularly applied to
immigrant groups, especially when increases in immigration begin to be perceived as a threat to security. In Brown Tide Rising, Otto Santa Ana documents how media discourse on immigration typically uses “overtly racist and
dehumanizing” terms. Animal images provide the dominant metaphor for
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immigrants, with secondary metaphors of the hunt supporting and reinforcing it. Illegal immigrants are described as “hunted down,” “baited,” “lured”
and “ferreted out.” News reports frequently talk about the “hordes” “pouring”
across the border instead of employing more accurate, more neutral descriptions such as “people walking across.” 9 Santa Ana argues that far from being
mere figures of speech, such metaphors produce and support negative public
perceptions of the Latino community; he reveals how metaphorical language
repeatedly publically portrays Latinos as invaders, outsiders, burdens, parasites, diseases, animals, and weeds.
These metaphors are not simply artful descriptors or enlivening figures of
speech. As Donald Schon has influentially argued, the work of metaphor
goes much further: metaphors represent a manner of perception, a special
way of seeing. The way in which we frame social problems has a significant
impact on the way we identify and structure solutions to them; for Schon,
“the framing of problems often depends upon the metaphors underlying the
stories which generate problem setting and set the direction of problem solving.”10 To exemplify this claim, he compares the treatment of two problematic housing developments; in one, slum areas were metaphorically defined
as a “blight” or “disease”; in the other, they were perceived as “natural communities.” The medical metaphor implicit in the first situation justifies a
medical response, such as figurative radical surgery, to eliminate the disease;
the other metaphorical model, in contrast, calls for ways of acknowledging
and enhancing the life of those communities.
Metaphors offer a way of selecting, labeling, and understanding “facts,” a
process that may filter or distort what is perceived. If we are unaware of the
ways in which our metaphors influence and shape our perception and understanding of social situations, Schon says, then this process of influence is
even more powerful. When metaphors remain tacit or implicit, they can condition the way in which a situation is understood as problematic. The consequences of buried, indirect, or hidden metaphors can therefore be dangerously counter-productive, constraining and sometimes negatively controlling
the way in which individuals and groups construct the world in which they
live and act. If the metaphor no longer remains tacit, however, because an effort is made to make it visible and conscious, then possibilities which were
suppressed when the dominant metaphor was only implied may emerge. The
assumptions which arise from the metaphor can then be evaluated deliberately, and the metaphor can be kept or discarded depending upon its appropriateness and usefulness. We can find an example of a deliberate discarding
of a stale, pejorative metaphoric frame in the recent decision of the British
government officially to renounce the use of the phrase “war on terror,” the
metaphor previously so dominant as to eclipse all others in public and pri-
Talking Our Way to Peace
205
vate discourse. Sir Ken MacDonald, Director of Public Prosecutions, said the
British government will “resist the language of warfare,” refuting phrases that
entrench and frame all discussion of public attack in martial terms. Such warlike language creates “fear-driven and inappropriate” responses that, MacDonald warns, might lure the British public into disregarding due process of
law. When critique and examination of the martial metaphor becomes part
of legitimated public debate, metaphoric space is opened up for new and
more liberatory framings. 11
Schon insists on the importance of adopting a conscious process of frame
restructuring, involving the design of a new narrative or metaphor that sets
the problem in a new way. Within the new metaphor, conflicting frames may
be integrated by including features and relations drawn from earlier
metaphors without sacrificing internal coherence, forcefulness, or clarity. Instead of preventing or limiting action, a conscious integration of metaphor
may allow for new and enlarged possibilities of action.
Blechman and Docherty propose, therefore, that we choose more constructive metaphoric frameworks, such as education, medicine, or crime, to
replace the dominant war metaphor. Each of these allows for productive possibilities that are precluded by the war metaphor. The crime metaphor, for
example, has the benefit of allowing citizens to “assist law enforcement personnel by endorsing social sanctions, depriving criminals of their cover, and
aiding officials when asked to do so.”12 If “the goal of a justice system is
restoration, not punishment,” add Blechman and Doherty, then the criminal
metaphor, unlike the war metaphor, can offer “a platform for a restorative
model of interaction with the terrorists.”13
We need to actively seek out a workable, effective alternative to the war
metaphor because our history is already “too full of the stories of war and too
short on the stories of peace.” Instead, we require a new narrative, with a better
conclusion; perhaps in place of the narrative of the leader-as-general, who responds to attack with annihilating aggression, we might substitute the story, suggest Blechman and Doherty, “about the wise leader who listened to all the counselors and then chose the path of peace, reconciliation and justice.”14 New
stories also create freedom by allowing us to adopt new roles within them, letting us move from passivity and conformity to creativity and possibility. When
leaders regretfully tell us we must follow their injunctions because there are simply no other possibilities, Blechman and Doherty urge us to respond from these
newly enlarged roles: “Wait, we can think of other options you haven’t tried.”15
Treating terrorist attacks as criminal acts within a legal rather than military frame also allows us to consider effective and contextualized responses;
Stephen R. Shalom urges us to consider the crime analogy as a way to treat
underlying causes rather than merely symptoms. “Some people brought up in
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grueling poverty become anti-social criminals” who “need to be brought to
justice,” Shalom argues; when analysts point out that poverty breeds crime,
it “doesn’t mean that criminals should be permitted to continue their crime
sprees or that somehow they were justified in slitting the throat of this or that
innocent victim,”16 but it does mean that the continuing condition of
poverty will continue to create new criminals without some serious intervention or redress. Richard Haass, a former director of policy planning in the
U.S. State Department and president of the Council on Foreign Relations,
also suggests that the most important first move in fighting terrorism is to dispense with “the metaphor of a war on terrorism”; terrorism cannot, he insists,
“be defeated by arms alone. Other instruments of policy including intelligence, police work and diplomacy, are likely to play a larger part.”17 But
much more important, he argues, is to “persuade young men and women not
to become terrorists in the first place.” Terrorism needs to be stripped not
only of its legitimacy but, even more importantly, of its motivation. This
translates, says Haass, into changes in foreign policy, with the aim of creating an environment in which terrorism is “neither acceptable nor necessary.”18 The conscious disposal of the metaphors that have not served us well,
as more diverse voices are beginning to urge, is a crucial first step in moving
towards that environment, a world in which terrorism is not defeated but
made irrelevant.
Journalism and Peace
Some of these creative new options are beginning to emerge from sources
outside of mainstream media and traditional government. Peace journalism,
in particular, sets itself against the methods of mainstream news reporting,
insisting that journalists have a choice in how they cover violent conflict. By
rejecting the formats and formula of traditional journalism, journalists can
shed light on issues of human rights and their violation, focus coverage on
hate crimes and hate groups, and publicize important humanitarian efforts. A
more emancipatory media framing can help formulate solutions to what seem
like intractable conflicts rather than framing conflicts as inevitable because
they emerge from fundamental and essential difference. A critical and selfaware media can also help reduce the dominance of rumor and propaganda.19
In these ways, says Robert Karl Manoff, media can play a key role in preventing and moderating conflict. This means, of course, that media can also
do the opposite. If it chooses to be complicit as, John Pilger argues, it often
is in demonizing the enemy and enlisting public support for governments’
war policies, then it gives up its vaunted and largely illusory objectivity in the
service of war.20 Why not instead, ask the new peace journalists, serve some-
Talking Our Way to Peace
207
thing else? Rune Ottosen rejects “war journalism” as “violence-oriented,
propaganda-oriented, elite-oriented and victory-oriented”; this orientation
not only reinforces official propaganda, Ottosen says, it also often plays a significant role in escalating conflicts.21
In order to resist this role, John Galtung has identified key journalistic problems common to traditional reporting. In covering conflict, mainstream news
media risk intensifying that conflict through its metaphoric frames and representations. These media representations, Galtung observes, tend to decontextualize violence, focusing on its irrational elements and overlooking the reasons
for conflict and polarization. They indulge in an often simplistic dualism, reducing parties in a conflict to only two, when there are frequently many more,
and then splitting the two parties into the “good” and the “evil.” They present
violence as inevitable, failing to depict or even suggest possible alternatives, and
focus on individual acts of violence while avoiding causes. By omitting and excluding the voices of the bereaved, for example, they fail to provide a way to understand contexts, acts of revenge and spirals of violence. Just as they fail to explore peace proposals and “offer images of peaceful outcomes,” they “fail to
explore the goals of outside interventionists,” especially major powers, and further fail to “explore the causes of escalation and the impact of media coverage
itself.”22 As a consequence of these failures, traditional news coverage tends to
confuse peace with cease-fire and negotiations, and to omit representing actual
reconciliation; if, Galtung argues, sufficient effort is not put into healing fractured societies, then conflicts generally re-emerge, often in an intensified form.
Worse, if media fail to provide news about attempts to resolve conflicts, then an
oppressive sense of fatalism is reinforced; if “people have no images or information about possible peaceful outcomes and the promise of healing” to balance
the fatalism, further violence may be engendered.23
Given that media can play an important role in creating the conditions
for peace and can act as a mediator and communication medium for nonviolent conflict resolution, peace radio in particular stands out as having the
capability of bridging even the most insurmountable of divides. One such radio station is 107.2 FM Radio All for Peace in Israel-Palestine, a collaborative effort between Palestinian and Jewish organizations. Their goal is to expose people in both Palestine and Israel to positive messages of “peace,
cooperation, mutual understanding, coexistence and hope.”24
Conclusion
Metaphors matter. They are figures of thought as much as figures of speech,
and in their framing of events and identities they offer a way to understand
our world and to act within it. With this power to generate and shape action,
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metaphor is a potent force; it is no wonder that Nietzsche described truth as
a “mobile army of metaphors.”25 This potency is greatest when it attacks both
overtly and covertly; at their most effective, metaphors are surreptitious.
When we use our intelligence to scout them out, however, stripping them of
their camouflage and bringing them into the light, we empower ourselves.
If awareness is one of the most contested terrains on the battlefield, then
every time we critically disinter a metaphor, we gain metaphorical ground.
As T. J. Barnes insists, “in a very real sense, there is nothing trifling about a
metaphor . . . we must eventually think critically about the metaphors we
choose—where they come from, why they were proposed, in whose interest
they represent, and the nature of their implications.”26 If we don’t engage in
these acts of critical consciousness, Barnes warns, we may find ourselves “the
slave of some defunct maker of metaphors.”27
One sobering example of a slavish attachment to destructive metaphor
may be found in a recent 2007 cartoon by Michael Ramirez28, which shows
a map of the Middle East with, in its center, the country Iran replaced by a
huge sewer grating. The associative linking of country with sewer is difficult
to miss, but in case we do, Ramirez’ image makes it clear by labeling the sewer
“Iran” and adding, in much smaller, harder to make out typeface, the additional word “Extremism.” Out of the sewer cover, in an image by now familiar, swarms a mass of loathsome cockroaches spreading inexorably into the
surrounding countries of Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. “It is very sad,” says Ali Sheikholeskami, executive director of the Islamic Cultural Center of Northern California, “that American media has
come down to such a level and that there is no outcry of the American public against these types of cartoons or this type of dehumanization of an entire
nation.”29 Perhaps even more sad is the tenaciousness of our attachment to
these dehumanizing metaphors, and the way they both chronicle and are
used to justify further conquest; in the fall of 2007 Time magazine reported
that “The prospect of war with Iran is beginning to look real.”30 This is a prediction that might singularly fail to surprise us, if we are alert to the transpositions of these wearily familiar images representing the enemy-Other from
Iraq to Iran, as we see so clearly in Ramirez’s cartoon. If, as Seymour Hirsch
quotes a former U.S. intelligence official as saying, “There is a desperate effort by Cheney et al. to bring military action to Iran as soon as possible,”31
then one way to rally public support for wars as yet undeclared is to rally the
public around such images of primal infestation and threat. The enemy as
cockroach, used to justify war and genocide, is clearly not even close to being, in Barnes’ terms, “defunct.” It is for this reason that metaphor remains
so critical. While philosophers like Richard Rorty who analyze metaphor
Talking Our Way to Peace
209
have been criticized for not paying enough attention to how power and material economic conditions can influence the workings of metaphor and who
controls and deploys metaphoric systems, Rorty’s work is nevertheless suggestive in its assertion that to change metaphors is to change the conversation; at the very least, he says, coining a new metaphor can produce a new
vivacity of speech, or turn the conversation to a new direction.32
Turning the conversation is often an admirable goal in itself; it allows for
the entry of new ideas and new voices and can realign a dangerous trajectory.
For a conversation to be turned, however, it must first exist as a dialogue: a
speech, tirade, or monologue is much harder to interrupt, break into, or turn
aside. Sometimes, then, we must undertake a more fundamental task in order
simply to allow the conversation to begin. If, as Nelson suggests, we talk our
way into war with rhetoric and propaganda and talk our way out of it with negotiations and treaties, we might consider the possibility of using talk to turn
aside from war, to turn to new alternatives and talk our way to new solutions.33
We might insist on new metaphors to take us to these decisive turns. We
might ask of ourselves and our leaders, in what service is our army of
metaphors deployed? And, more importantly, what would happen if we disbanded our metaphoric army, not only finally discharging those metaphors
that are irreparably linked to difference and denigration, but, more radically,
enlisting a new conceptual model altogether? The more fundamental and
deep-rooted our present metaphors, the more powerful and far-reaching the
change we initiate when we alter them. If we currently face, as Gibson Winter argues, a “crisis of root metaphors,” then “a shift in metaphors may open
new vistas of human possibilities.”34 Freeing ourselves from our “dead
metaphors,” Orla Schantz argues, will “free us to develop a talent for speaking
differently,” a talent that will allow us to discover that “it is rhetorical innovation” that is ultimately the “chief instrument of cultural and political
change.”35 If our identities are tied up in the language we use, the metaphors
we create, and the stories we tell, then when we choose to change that language, those metaphors, and those stories, we exert a powerful freedom to
change not only the enemy, but ourselves. If, as Rorty urged, we ourselves are
a narrative, a text of identity always being written, then in choosing to change
the metaphors by which we dehumanize the enemy, we can commensurately
and productively change our own story. “Our language,” says Schantz, “exhibits sheer contingency, thus we are not forever bound to the vocabularies of
our ancestors or their gods. We need not worship the corpses of their dead
metaphors.”36 We can, if we choose, exert a textual autonomy that rejects the
divisiveness of the dominant discourse, that rejects the binaries endlessly subdividing the “us” from the “them,” the “I” from the “Other.” And if, as peace
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scholars affirm, “the struggle for identity lies at the nexus of war and peace,”
with the prognosis for peace rising when identities are not at risk,37 then
changing the conversation becomes as radical an act as changing the world.
Notes
1. Trevor Barnes and James Duncan. Writing Worlds: Discourse, Text and Metaphor
in the Representation of Landscape. London and New York: Routledge, 1992:12.
2. Bill Clinton speech. “Remarks on American security in a changing world at
George Washington University.” American Presidency Project. August 5, 1996. See
www.presidency .ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=53161 (July 26, 2007).
3. Stephen R. Shalom. “Confronting Terrorism and War.” New Politics, vol. 8,
no. 4, Winter 2002.
4. Mickey Z. “Which Wolf Will You Feed in 2006?” Dissidentvoice.org. December
31, 2005. See http://www.dissidentvoice.org/Dec05/MickeyZ1231.htm (March 28,
2008).
5. E. L. Doctorow. “False documents.” American Review. Volume, 29. 1977:
231–32.
6. Cited in hatecrime.org. “Nazi Anti-Jewish Speech VS. Religious Right AntiGay Speech.” See www.hatecrime.org/subpages/hitler/hitler.html (July 25, 2007).
7. Cited in Jack Nichols. The Gay Agenda: Talking Back to the Fundamentalists.
Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1996.
8. sourcewatch. “Paul Cameron.” See www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Paul_
Cameron (July 25, 2007).
9. Otto Santa Ana. Brown Tide Rising. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press,
2002.
10. Donald Schon. “Generative metaphor: a perspective on problem setting in social policy.” In Andrew Ortony (Ed). Metaphor and Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1979: 254–83.
11. Clare Dyer, “There is no ‘war on terror’.” The Guardian. January 24, 2007.
12. Frank Blechman and Jayne Seminare Docherty “Frameworks Other Than War.”
Beyond September 11. September 14, 2001. See www.emu.edu/ctp/bse-metaphor3.html
(June 26, 2007).
13. Frank Blechman and Jayne Seminare Docherty. “Frameworks Other Than War.”
14. Frank Blechman and Jayne Seminare Docherty. “Frameworks Other Than War.”
15. Frank Blechman and Jayne Seminare Docherty. “Frameworks Other Than War.”
16. Stephen R. Shalom. “Confronting Terrorism and War.” New Politics. Vol. 8,
no. 4, Winter 2002.
17. Richard N. Haass. “Fighting terror—We are still behind the curve.” Council on
Foreign Relations. August 11, 2006. See www.cfr.org/publication/11281/fighting_
terror_we _are_still_behind_the_curve.html (July 28, 2007).
18. Richard N. Haass. “Fighting terror.”
Talking Our Way to Peace
211
19. Robert Karl Manoff. “The Media’s Role in Preventing and Moderating Conflict.” Virtual Diplomacy conference hosted by United States Institute of Peace in Washington, D.C., April 1–2, 1997.
20. Rune Ottosen. “Emphasising Images in Peace Journalism,” Conflict and Communication online. Vol. 6, No.1, 2007.
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Index
9/11: advertiser’s response, 173, 192;
and backlash against Muslims, 132,
138, 189–194; and racial profiling,
193; blamed on Iraq, 145;
Commission, 172; government
advice to media following, 159, 169;
origins of war metaphor and
dehumanizing images, xi, 10, 14,
111, 155, 159; media patriotism
following, 176, 178
Abu Ghraib, ix, x, 21, 22, 60, 84–86,
89, 91, 135, 136, 138
ACLU (American Civil Liberties
Union), 194
Afghanistan, 21, 76, 78, 105–106,
110–113, 136, 159, 161–164, 208
African-Americans, 42–43, 102, 193
Ahmadinejad, Mahmoud, 138
Al-Jazeera, 82, 113, 114, 171, 183, 208
Al-Mahmudiyah, xiii
Al-Qaeda, xii, 76–77, 82–83, 111, 141,
169
All for Peace (radio station), 207
American Forces Radio and Television
Services, 135
Amnesty International, 85, 86, 161
animal behavior metaphors: brand 42;
breed, 52, 74, 123; herd, 39, 44;
spawn, 112, 113, 197; leash, ix, x,
84, 87, 138; ride, 84
animal habitat metaphors: burrow, 72;
cage, 85, 86; den, 45, 74; lair, 72, 73,
80; nest, 72, 73, 76, 79, 80, 81, 82,
84, 119, 120,123; scum, xi, 137;
swamp, 45, 71, 72, 74, 77
animal metaphors, 69–87, 111–121:
beast, monster, xvi, 4, 39, 42– 45,
74–76, 84, 86, 88, 91; cockroach, 55,
56, 78, 81, 82, 119, 208; eagle, 111,
112, 116; fox, 115; hornet, 81, 82,
119, 120; rats, xii, xvi, 46, 48, 52,
72, 76–78, 80, 115–117, 120, 203;
rodent, 71, 72, 76–79, 83, 116, 123;
snakes, xii, 49, 50, 52, 71, 79, 80, 83,
84, 107, 112, 113, 125; spider,
80–81; turkey shoot, 56; vermin, xvi,
38, 40, 45, 48, 51, 52, 72, 76, 77, 83,
84, 116, 123, 137, 138, 197, 203;
viper, 52, 79, 80; weasel, 78–79, 104,
105
237
238
Index
Arab: dehumanization of, 22, 55, 60;
grievances against the West, 159,
195, 196; media, 183; negative
representations of, 14, 22, 25, 30, 31,
32, 100, 103, 104, 120, 138, 202,
208; racism and discrimination
against, 132, 138, 141, 143, 189–195;
represented as terrorists, 102, 191;
See also “Flying While Arab”
Aristotle, 4–6, 42
Australia, 145, 146, 170
backlash against Muslims, 189–195
backlash against U.S. policy, 191
Bali, xvii
Barnes, Trevor, and Jonathan Duncan,
201, 208
Basra, 73, 78
Baudrillard, Jean, 89, 90
Belgium, 142
Berlusconi, Silvio, xi
Bernays, Edward, 19
Bin Laden, Osama, 32, 81, 82, 105, 111,
169, 193
black sites, 180, 182
Blair, Tony, 85, 113, 115, 167
blowback, 196
Blumenthal, Sidney, 131, 137
Boggs, Carl and Pollard, Tom, 103, 104
Bosnia-Herzegovnia, 76, 77
Breen, Steve, 111
Britain, xii, 74, 80, 84, 113, 145, 170,
171, 192, 193. See also United
Kingdom
Brock, David, 135, 172
Bush administration: 2004 electoral
win, 14; ban on coffin images, 162;
framing of war on terror, 9, 13;
planting fake news stories, 167;
proposed bombing of Al Jazeera, 113;
punishment for oppositional media,
167, 180; rewards for compliant
media, 167, 170, 171, 172, 178, 179;
weapons of mass destruction, 145,
179, 181
Bush, George W.: cartoon
representations, 115, 119, 120;
“crusade” speech, 30; support from
the media, 171, 172, 178, 179
Bush, Jeb, 169
Cagle, Darryl, x, 114, 115, 119
Calderoli, Robert, xi
Calvin and Hobbes, 105
Canada, xii, 41, 117, 118, 145, 161,
163,164, 191
Cardow, Cameron, 117, 118
cartoons. See political cartoons
cartoon controversy. See Jyllands-Posten
Mohammed cartoon controversy
Caswell, Lucy Shelton, 106
censorship, 18, 60, 108, 146, 162, 164,
167, 177; self-censorship, 167, 176,
177
Cheney, Dick, 134, 162
Chomsky, Noam, 174, 176, 177
Chomsky, Noam, and Herman, Edward,
162, 172, 174, 176, 177
Christianity, xvii, 30, 31, 79, 100, 102,
103, 108, 110, 138, 192, 194
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 19,
180, 182, 196
Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 4
civilian casualties, ix, xiii, xvii, 11, 20,
21, 23, 27, 49, 55, 57, 60, 90, 116,
136, 137, 138, 160, 161, 165
Clash of civilizations, 9, 30, 31, 101, 109,
195
Clinton, Bill, 201
Coburn, Judith, 161
coffins, ban on publication, 163–164
collateral damage, 20, 194
Colliers magazine, 46, 47
colonialism, 24, 54, 142, 156, 190, 196
Columbine High School, 202
Cooksey, John, 193
Index
Coulter, Ann, xvi, xvii, 138, 139, 140,
144, 147
Counterstrike (video game), 100
Council of American Islamic Relations
(CAIR), 192
cowardice, 14, 44, 51, 71, 78
Cox, John, and Forkum, Allen, 112, 125
Crockett, Davy, 44
crusade, 30, 195
culture of fear, 192–197
Danchev, Alex, 86, 87
de Menezes, Jean Charles, 193
Deck of Death, 105–105
Deck of Weasels, 104–105
dehumanization, 37–61; and Japanese
Foes in WWII, 45–48; and native
peoples, 43–45; and Nazi
representation of Jews, 50–55; and
Persian Gulf War, 55–57; and
slavery, 42–43; and Vietnam, 48–50
Deng Coy Miel, 112
Defence Contractor, 166, 170
Denmark, xii, 52, 53, 107, 108, 110
Desert rat (British 7th Armoured
Brigade), 77
difference, 190, 196, 202, 206; as
disease, xi; and enemies, 14, 29, 124;
as threat, 147
disease metaphor, xi, xii, xvi, 38, 40, 50,
52, 69, 76, 81–83, 114, 118, 122,
204; cancer, xii, xiii, 12, 40, 82–83,
122, 125, 197; infection, 38, 51, 52;
gangrene, xi; plague, xvi, 4, 52, 76,
78, 123; virus, xii, 82
disinformation, 19, 20
Disney, 144, 169
dissent, 9–13, 29, 104, 113, 141, 145,
162, 167, 180, 194
Dixie Chicks, 11
Docherty, Jayne, 8, 11
Docherty, Jayne, and Frank Blechman,
205
239
domestic surveillance program, 9
Donahue, Phil, 176, 179
Dower, John, 45
Eagleburger, Lawrence, xi
Edwards, David, 159, 167
Edwards, John, 9
Egypt, 195
El Amine, Rayan, 30
embedded reporters, xv, 164–166, 181
Emmerson, Rod, 116
enemy combatant, 85
Engelhardt, Tom, 20, 21
Ethnic Cleansing: The Game, 101
Euro-Weasel, 78
Europe, European, xi, xii, xiii, 19, 24,
25, 42–48, 100, 108–110, 118, 142,
182, 191, 192, 196
extermination metaphors, 121–125;
annihilation, xiii, xvii, 7, 44,
82–83, 91, 101, 105, 123, 125, 142,
147, 190; eradication, xi, xvii,
xviii, 38, 52, 82–83, 91, 122; nuke,
xi, 83
Falcon, Allen Lauzon, 116, 117
Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),
194
Federal Communications Commission
(FCC), 170
fabricated enemy, 26–33
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
(FAIR), 140, 168, 169, 173, 174,
175
Fallujah, 60, 73, 74, 76, 81, 88, 136,
181
feminist, 133, 137
fifth columnist, 9, 10, 14
Fisk, Robert, 181, 191
flags, 8, 19, 56, 71, 108, 117, 118, 163,
169, 176, 178
“Flying While Arab,” 193
freedom fighter, 23
240
Index
friendly fire, 20
force multipliers, 165
Fox News, 135, 137, 157, 169, 170, 171,
172, 178; Fox (News) Effect, 178, 179
Galtung, John, 207
Gannett News Company, 170
gay, 141. See also homosexual
Geneva Convention, 20, 56, 86, 88, 89,
136, 195
genocide, xiii, xvii, 40, 41, 42, 45, 52,
54, 60, 82, 84, 132, 142, 143, 144,
145, 208
Goebbels, Joseph, 19
Goering, Herman, 19
Goodman, Amy, 181–182
Guantánamo Bay, 77, 85, 86, 87
gypsies, 32
Haass, Richard, 206
Haditha, xiii, 20, 21, 137, 138
Hart, William, and Hassencahl, Fran,
111, 120
hate speech, 141–146
Hawkes, Terrence, 5
Hersh, Seymour, 60, 180
Highway of Death (Gulf War), 55, 56
Hispanic, 102, 141. See also Latino
Hitler, Adolf, xvii, 19, 45, 50, 52, 61,
84, 136, 146
Hollywood, 100, 101, 103, 104
holocaust, 110, 142
homegrown terrorism, 74
Homeland Security, 14
homosexual, 32, 137, 203. See also gay
Homospatiality, 115
hotel journalism, 181
Huffaker, Sandy, 113, 114
hunt (metaphor), 11, 21, 49, 50, 56, 72,
73, 74, 75, 81, 87, 88, 91, 114, 115,
116, 121, 204
Huntington, Samuel, 30, 31
Hussein, Saddam, 32, 56, 57, 80, 81, 84,
110, 115, 137, 168, 196
infection. See disease metaphors
infestation, xii, xiii, xvi, 52, 82, 84,
192, 208
International Covenant on Civil and
Political Rights (ICCPR ), 144, 145
Iran, 112, 119, 125, 145, 171, 208
Iraq/Iraqi: casualties, xiii,60, 160, 165;
and blowback, 196–197; and enemy
construction, 28, 32; experience of
US soldiers in, 58, 59; framing
language of war with, 14, 17; fueling
radicalism in, 197; media coverage of,
167–182; “Most wanted” deck of
cards, 104; neo-colonial
representation, 157; newspaper
headlines concerning, 72–83; public
perception of 9/11 terrorists as, 17,
18; Persian Gulf War, 55, 159;
portrayal as terrorists, 57; protest of
invasion of, 161; public perceptions,
157; rape and assault of, 90;
representation in cartoons, 105–125,
208; subject of talk radio, 135;
treatment by US soldiers, 22, 23, 60,
85–90, See also Haditha; Abu Ghraib;
Weapons of Mass Destruction
Islam, Muslim: media framing of, 158,
191, 208; negative representations
of, 30,32, 76, 81–84, 102, 105, 112,
125; racism and discrimination
against, xi, xvii, 138, 189–195; See
also Clash of Civilizations; JyllandsPosten Mohammed cartoon
controversy; Islamophobia
Islamophobia, 31, 102, 110, 192
Israel, 21, 137, 172, 195, 207
Japan, 27, 29, 33, 40, 42, 122, 123, 125;
in WWII, 45–48
Jehovah Witnesses, 32
Jensen, Robert, 178
Jewish (Jew), xiii, 32, 33, 41, 42, 50–55,
72, 77, 102, 110, 142, 143, 207
Index
Johnson, Chalmers, 196
Johnson, Mark, 6, 7
Johnson, Sam xi
Jordan, 195
Jyllands-Posten Mohammed cartoon
controversy, 107, 108, 109, 110
Kallen, Evelyn, 146
Kamiya, Gary, 159, 160
Kangura, 55, 143
Karim, Karim H., 158
Keen, Sam, 37, 38, 39, 41, 49, 50, 111,
118
Kellner, Douglas, 55
Khan, Irene, 195
killology, 57
King, Peter, xi
Kirk, Mark, xi
Klein, Naomi, 195, 196
Klu Klux Klan (KKK), 101, 101
Knickmeyer, Ellen, 182–183
Knight-Ridder, 17, 179, 180
Koran, 21, 84, 82, 136
Kuwait, 19, 55, 56, 163
Latinos, 204; See also Hispanic
Lakoff, George, 6, 7, 12, 71, 80, 107,
117
Lakoff, George, and Frisch, Evan, 12
Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark, 6,
7, 107
Lebanon, 108, 137, 172
Left Behind: Eternal Forces (video game),
100
Lehrer, Jim, 178
Lester, Mike, 113, 120, 121
Limbaugh, Rush, 135, 136, 140, 144, 172
Lincoln Group, 166
Lippman, Walter, 19
London, xvii, 31, 193, 196
Luntz, Frank, 13, 14
McChesney, Robert, 174
McDermott, Jim, 22
241
media coverage of the war on terror,
160–162; critical journalism,
179–183; See also embedded
reporters
media filters, 162–179; media and
advertisers, 172–174; media and flak,
175–177; media and government,
162–168; media and ideology,
177–179; media and owners,
168–172; media and self-censorship,
176–177; media and sources,
174–175; media framing and
representation, 158–160
Media Matters for America, 135, 139,
172
metaphor, 3–7; and cognition, 3, 6–7,
107; definition of, 3, 5;
dehumanizing, xii, xiv, 4, 37–39,
42–57, 69–84, 105, 111–121, 155,
197, 202–204, 208; and the enemy,
8, 11, 28, 69, 71–76, 79–87, 113,
120, 203; extermination, 40–42, 52,
118, 121–125, 155; figurative
language, 5; homospatiality, 115;
interpretation, 71–72; to justify
violence, 37–39, 43–48, 49–57;
landscape, 71–72; limiting solutions,
8, 72, 114, 121, 197, 202–206, 209;
in media, 203, 206, 207; metaphoric
entrapment, 113, 120; metonymy,
26; military, 57–61; Orientalism,
26–28, 100, 119; paranoia, 39, 52,
113, 118; propaganda, 17, 31, 118,
122, 124; racism, 27–33, 37–40,
42–55, 56–57, 118, 203–204; reality
construction, 6–7, 204; rhetorical
roots of, 4–5; symbolism, 69, 70, 72,
91–92, 111–121; synecdoche, 26;
war on terror, 71–76, 78–85,
111–121, 204–206, 207–210; See also
animal metaphors; war metaphors
McVeigh, Timothy, 102, 103
Moore, Michael, 169
mosque, 84, 102, 109, 120, 191
242
Index
military, U.S.: ban on coffin images,
162–163; chain of command, 22;
and dehumanization, 57–60;
families, 173; internal resistance, 56;
as media sources, 168, 174;
metaphors, 10–17, 52, 205; and
military-industrial complex, 168;
military working dogs, 86–87;
planting false stories, 161; positive
media coverage, 161; psyops, 166;
relations to chemical industry, 122;
and relationship to media owners,
168; and suicide rates, 58–59;
support for, 18; and talk radio,
136–137; training to kill, 57–58; See
also Guantanamo Bay; war trophies;
war porn; defence contractors;
embedded reporters; Haditha; Abu
Ghraib; Killology
Murdoch, Rupert, 171, 172
My Lai, 21, 49, 180
National Public Radio (NPR), 157, 169
Native Americans, 43, 44, 203
North Atlantic Treaty Organization
(NATO), 160, 161
Naureckas, Jim, 57
Nazis, xiii, xvii, 32, 41, 45, 50, 51, 52,
53, 60, 61, 72, 125, 142, 192
Neo-Nazi, 145
nuclear weapons, annihilation, 105,
106, 125, 179, 180
Nuremburg Rallies, 61
Nuremburg Trials, 142, 143, 169
O’Reilly, Bill, 9, 10, 132, 133, 135–137,
139, 140
Oklahoma City bombing, 102, 140, 201
Olsen, Ken, 141
Orientalism, xiii, 24, 25, 26, 28, 54, 119
Ortega y Gasset, José, 3, 4
Orwell, George, 27, 28, 54
Ottosen, Rune, 207
Pew Research Center for People and
the Press, 133, 177
Pakistan, 73, 81, 86, 191, 195, 208
Palestine, 110, 207
Parenti, Michael, 158
patriotism, 12, 13, 19, 104, 160, 177,
178
Patriot Act, 193
Payne, Kenneth, 160, 166
peace metaphors, 201–210
peace journalism, 206–210
peace movement, 161, 175
Peek, Lori, 26
Persian Gulf War (1991), 19, 55, 57,
77, 105, 110, 159, 164
Philo, Greg, 156, 157
Pilger, John, 56, 180, 181, 182, 206
pink triangle, 32
Pipes, Daniel, xi, xi
plague. See disease metaphors
political cartoons, 106–125
popular culture, 99–106
pornography, 90, 91, 101. See also war
pornography
propaganda, 17–24
prosecution of hate speech, 142, 144
psyops. See military
Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), 157,
175, 178, 179, 182
public opinion, 18, 19, 160, 167, 202
public relations (PR), 19, 33, 175, 181
quisling, 9, 14, See also cowardice
race: clash of civilizations, 30, 31, 101,
109, 195; and dehumanization,
37–61, 71–76, 78–87, 105, 110,
111–121, 137, 138, 157, 197; in
editorial cartoons, 106–125; enemy
construction, 26–33, 37–61, 118,
124, 196; as fuel for war, 190, 196,
197; genocide, 37–42, 43–45; and
hate crimes, 191, 192; and hate
Index
speech, 140–146, 190–92; in
headlines, 31–87, 197; and
indistinguishability, 25–28, 32, 38,
54, 102, 117, 119, 137, 157; in
media, 31, 72–76, 78–85, 102,
106–121, 156–157, 171, 191, 197;
the Other of Orientalism, 24–26,
28–31, 100, 101, 119; in popular
culture, 99–104, 189; in public
discourse, 131–132, 140, 141–47,
193, 202–204; in talk radio,
131–132, 134, 136, 137, 138,
140–141, 193; trophy-taking, 87–92,
115; in war on terror, 14, 71–87,
106–111, 196
Racial and Religious Tolerance Act
(Australia), 146
racial profiling, 191, 192, 193, 194
racist war against the developing world,
195–197
radio. See talk radio
radio hoax, 33
Ramirez, Michael, 208
Rather, Dan, 176, 178
Razack, Sherene, 90, 91
Red Cross, 84, 86
Rendon, John, 19
Rendall, Steve, 133, 140
Rendall, Steve, and Broughel, Tara, 174
Reuters, 23
Rice, Condolezza, 169
Roberts, Cokie, 178
Robertson, Pat, 192
Robinson, Piers, 160
Rorty, Richard, 208, 209
Rose, Flemming, 108
Rumsfeld, Donald, 20, 71
Russell, Edmund, 122, 123
Ruud, Kathryn, 146
Rwanda, 54, 142, 143
Said, Edward, 24, 25, 27, 32, 33
Sanchez, Ricardo, 80
243
sanctions, 159, 205
Santa Ana, Otto, 203
Sarkozy, Nicolas, xi
Savage, Michael, 54, 132, 133, 137,
138, 140, 144, 176
Saudi Arabia, 195, 208
Schon, Donald, 204
Shaheen, Jack, 100, 102, 104
Shalom, Stephen, 202, 205, 206
Shapiro, Ben, 21, 28
Sheehan, Cindy, 28,
Sikhs, 192, 194
Silico, Tami, 163
slavery, 42
Smiley, Jane, 147
Snow, Nancy, 18
Solomon, Norman, 23, 168, 169
Sontag, Susan, 9, 12, 13, 89, 91
spin, vii, 20, 23, 160, 179
Stannard, David, 44, 48
Stanton, Gregory, 40, 41, 42, 44
Steicher, Julius, 142,
stereotype, 24, 25, 32, 102–110, 141,
157, 158, 191
suicide, military rate, 58–59
Sweden, 145
talk radio, 131–140
Tancredo, Tom, xi
terrorism: in cartoon representations,
11, 112, 113, 116, 118; associated
with Islam, 110, 125, 189, 191; as
“enemy of our generation”, 201;
homegrown, 74; metaphors and
discourses of, xii,xvi,xvii,81, 83, 202,
206; need to understand, examine,
201, 202, 203; solving, preventing,
160, 206; worsened by Iraq War, 190,
196, 197
Terrorism Index, 190, 197
Tetreault, Mary Ann, 90, 92
The Eternal Jew (film), 51, 118
Time-Warner, 170
244
Index
Tipton Three, 86
torture, 57, 60, 75, 86, 90, 91, 92, 135,
138, 168, 171, 180, 195
turban, ix, xiii, 77, 108, 110, 193
Turkey, 82, 108, 208
United Nations (UN), 78, 82, 104, 143,
144, 145, 159
United Kingdom (UK), 166, 192, 196
Uncle Sam, ix, 116, 119, 120, 123
Valenti, Jack, 100
Varvel, Gary, 115
Video News Releases (VNR), 167, 168,
175
Vines, Jerry, 192
voodoo doll, 105
war crimes, x, 56, 86, 89, 121, 137, 142,
143, 165
war metaphor, 7–15, 121, 203– 206;
alternatives to war metaphor,
205–206
war on terror: animal metaphors, 69–87,
111–121; binaries, 28; crusade, 30; as
a language strategy, 14; making the
world less safe, 190, 196, 197;
metaphor, language, discourse, xiii, xv,
xvii, 7–14, 203–206; popular culture,
99–106; public understanding, 157,
159; racism, 195, 196
war porn, 89–91
war trophies, 87–92
weapons of mass destruction, 145, 166,
179, 180, 181
Whittick, Arnold, 70, 79
Wing, Bob, 87
wolf parable, 203
Wolverton, Monte, 120
World Trade Center Attack. See 9/11
World War I, 59
World War II, 33, 45, 48, 58, 59, 142;
Japan, 45–48; Nazi representation of
Jews, 50–55. See also holocaust; Nazis
Zinn, Howard, 157
About the Authors
Erin Steuter is associate professor of Sociology at Mount Allison University
in Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada. Her MA and PhD theses examined
ideological representations of the news. Recipient of multiple awards for her
teaching and research, Erin Steuter is contacted regularly for interviews in
connection with her research and published works, which have appeared in
Political Communication and Persuasion, Canadian Journal of Communication,
Journal of American and Comparative Cultures, and other noted academic journals. Because of her deep interest in promoting media literacy, Dr. Steuter
conducts community workshops and visits schools to encourage greater understanding of the important issues of today.
Deborah Wills teaches in the English Department at Mount Allison University. She has published and presented papers in the areas of cultural studies, disability and illness in poetry, literary genre, eschatology, science fiction
and cyberpunk, magic realism, creative nonfiction and, most recently, horror
and neogothic literature and film. She is a recipient of the Herb and Leota
Tucker Award for Excellence in Teaching.
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